NP - The Myth of a Jobless Recovery

[David Morris]

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/01/08/myth_of_the_jobless_recovery.html

You may have heard of the idea of a "jobless recovery," a recovery in which
the economy grows but doesn't add jobs because of structural problems or
because firms are adding robots instead or whatnot. Some hot new research
from Laurence Ball, Daniel Leigh, and Prakash Loungani says the problem
here is there's no such thing as a jobless
recovery<http://papers.nber.org/papers/w18668#fromrss>and the classic
Okun's Law link between GDP growth and employment is
holding up fine. If recent recoveries haven't packed much job-creating
punch it's because the recoveries have been unusually slow in terms of GDP
growth as well.

I liked that paper because I recently sat through the presentation of an
economics paper showing that one leading explanation for jobless
recoveries—a reversal of traditional "labor hoarding" behavior
patterns—is wrong
and based on bad
data<http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/01/atus_and_productivity_why_so_much_economics_data_is_garbage_and_how_that.html>.
It turns out, in other words, that counter-cyclical productivity doesn't
explain jobless recoveries both because productivity isn't counter-cyclical
and because there are no jobless recoveries.
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