The next time they tell you Americans are “happy” with their employer provided health insurance remember that that “happiness” is fueled by willful ignorance of what the alternatives are really like and fear of losing what little crappy health care they currently have.
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The unemployment rate is currently about 3.6%, which is the lowest it has been in five decades. Time to break open the Champagne and blow into kazoos! So we invited an economist to the party, and, naturally, he ruined it.
David Blanchflower, an economist at Dartmouth College, believes the unemployment rate can go much lower. That’s one of the central arguments of his new book, Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone?. Central bankers, he says, have been making a huge mistake by not putting their foot on the gas and helping to drive us to an even better job market. The reason for this is that they’ve clung to an old view of what the unemployment rate actually means. What’s changed? And, more importantly, how low can we go?
