Still Far From Full Employment

When I look at the numbers that Daniel Gross is looking at, I find it impossible to understand why so many people think that we are close to full employment:

Invest Globally, Stagnate Locally - New York Times: By DANIEL GROSS: IN the United States and Europe, there has been a curious disconnect in recent years between the performance of the corporate sector and the performance of the overall economy. For example, median incomes for American workers have barely budged since 2000, while corporate profits have nearly doubled.... It's a truism in the large developed economies that capital is strong and labor is weak. From 2001 to the fourth quarter of 2005, corporate profits as a percentage of United States G.D.P. rose significantly, to 11.6 percent from about 7 percent. Companies have been able to keep a larger share of the cash they generate, rather than pay it out in wages, in part "because the labor market recovery has been weak," said J. Bradford DeLong, professor of economics at the University of California, Berkeley. Professor DeLong notes that while unemployment is low, other measures of labor-market health, from hours worked to the employment-to-population ratio, show it to be less than robust....

The heightened mobility of capital allows companies to invest their profits around the globe with considerable freedom. "American companies really haven't been sinking much of their gains back into domestic investment," said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. In the United States, nonresidential fixed investment as a percentage of G.D.P. fell to 11.56 percent in 2005 from 12.55 percent in 2000....