I worry about the Millennials - their employment, their student debt, their lack of skills training. Society's future rests with the incoming generation, and recently so much has been published (including opinion polls) indicating Millennials will be worse off than their parents.
But first some housekeeping. Last week I wrote on full employment, with my analysis/opinion being we had a ways to go to get to full employment. Since publishing this post, Bill Mitchell (billy blog) came out with more compelling evidence of the shortfall of full employment. One of his graphs says it all:
I computed the 'necessary' employment series based on the age-adjusted potential labour force (dark green line in the following graph).
The light blue line is the actual employment as measured by the BLS and the dotted red line is the level of employment that prevailed in November 2007 (the peak before the crisis).
This allows us to calculate how far below the 4.4 per cent unemployment rate (constant participation rate) the US employment level currently is.
There are two effects:
