EP 274 Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?

  If you listen to President Trump this is the best economy in years,
perhaps, ever. We have low unemployment numbers and a great uptick on
Wall Street.  If that’s the case, why does he keep pressuring the
Federal Reserve to lower interest rates in what the Fed Chairman, Jerome
Powell, says is not such a hot jobs market. David Blanchflower, a labor
economics professor at Dartmouth University and author of ‘Not
Working’, joins us to explain what the discrepancy is between what we
are told by officials and what we see and sense from our own lives.  He
says that economists, policy makers and bankers need to practice the
‘economics of walking about’.  By that he means, look at real lives and
make a judgment as to how things are going, because the published
unemployment rate today is an unreliable measure of the economy’s
performance.  Perhaps, the participation rate is a better indicator.  Or
the quality of the jobs available or ‘labor market slack’.  Whether you
like economics, or consider it the dismal science, Professor
Blanchflower explains it all in very understandable terms and helps
guide you to becoming your own economist as you sift through the ways
politicians will use the numbers to convince you of their positions in
2020.  Become better prepared, as well as entertained, on this episode.

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