Semi-Daily Journal Archive

The Blogspot archive of the weblog of J. Bradford DeLong, Professor of Economics and Chair of the PEIS major at U.C. Berkeley, a Research Associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research, and former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury.

Saturday, February 11, 2006

How Close Are We to Full Employment?

General Glut argues--based on a chart of the employment-to-population ratio for the male noninstitutional population 25-64--that we are still far below any reasonable definition of full employment.

I agree. But I worry about early retirements--men in their late fifties and early sixties who really don't want to work anymore. So I prefer to look at the male non-institutional population 25-54:

MEtP

It took two full decades--from 1980 to 2000--for "full employment" for this group to drop from 91% to 89%. It strains credulity to argue that in the last five years "full employment" for this group has dropped down to 87%.

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