{"id":52617,"date":"2012-11-14T10:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-11-14T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.lclark.edu\/hart-landsberg\/?p=1274"},"modified":"2012-11-12T21:24:27","modified_gmt":"2012-11-13T02:24:27","slug":"the-jobs-gap-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2012\/11\/14\/the-jobs-gap-2\/","title":{"rendered":"The Jobs Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is growing talk that the economy is finally on its way to recovery \u2014 \u201cA Steady, Slo-Mo Recovery\u201d \u2014 in the words<\/a> of Businessweek<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Here is how Peter Coy, writing in Businessweek<\/em>, explains<\/a> the growing consensus:<\/p>\n

Job growth is poised to continue increasing tax revenue, which will make it easier to shrink the budget deficit while keeping taxes low and preserving essential spending. All this will occur without any magic emanating from the Oval Office. It would have occurred if Mitt Romney had been elected president. \u201cThe economy\u2019s operating well below potential, and there\u2019s a lot of room for growth\u201d regardless of who\u2019s in office, says Mark Zandi, chief economist of forecaster Moody\u2019s Analytics.<\/p>\n

Something could still go wrong, but the median prediction of 37 economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators\u00a0is that during the next four years, economic growth will gather momentum as jobless people go back to work and unused machinery is put back into service. \u201cThe self-correcting forces in the economy will prevail,\u201d predicts Ben Herzon, senior economist at Macroeconomic Advisers, a forecasting firm in St. Louis.<\/p>\n

Before we get lulled to sleep, we need some perspective about the challenges ahead.\u00a0 How about this: we face a 9 million jobs gap<\/strong> between the number of jobs we have and the number we need, and this doesn\u2019t even address the low quality of the jobs being created.<\/p>\n

The chart below, taken from an Economic Policy Institute blog post<\/a>, illustrates the gap.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

As Heidi Shierholz, the author of the post, explains:<\/p>\n

The labor market has added nearly 5 million jobs since the post-Great Recession low in Feb. 2010. Because of the historic job loss of the Great Recession, however, the labor market still has 3.8 million fewer jobs than it had before the recession began in Dec. 2007. Furthermore, because the potential labor force grows as the population expands, in the nearly five years since the recession started we should have\u00a0added\u00a05.2 million jobs just to keep the unemployment rate stable. Putting these numbers together means the current\u00a0gap in the labor market is\u00a09.0 million jobs. To put that number in context: filling the 9 million jobs gap in\u00a0three years \u2014 by fall 2015 \u2014 while still keeping up with the growth in the potential labor force, would require adding around 330,000 jobs every single month between now and\u00a0then.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, our \u201cjob creators\u201d only created 171,000 net jobs in October. And that was considered a relatively good month.\u00a0\u00a0 The chart below<\/a>, from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities,\u00a0 gives a sense of what we are up against.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Of course, weak job growth in the past\u00a0doesn’t\u00a0mean that we cannot have strong job growth in the future. \u00a0On the other hand, such a change would require consensus on radically different policies than those currently being discussed and debated by those in power.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Martin Hart-Landsberg is a\u00a0professor of Economics<\/a>\u00a0and Director of the Political Economy Program\u00a0at\u00a0Lewis and Clark College<\/a>. \u00a0You can follow him at\u00a0Reports from the Economic Front<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is growing talk that the economy is finally on its way to recovery\u2014\u201cA Steady, Slo-Mo Recovery\u201d\u2014in the words of Businessweek. Here is how Peter Coy, writing in Businessweek, explains the growing consensus: Job growth is poised to continue increasing tax revenue, which will make it easier to shrink the budget deficit while keeping taxes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1852,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,12498,76],"class_list":["post-52617","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-economics","tag-economics-great-recession","tag-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52617","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1852"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=52617"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52617\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":52623,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/52617\/revisions\/52623"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=52617"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=52617"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=52617"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}