| 摘要 | This article appears in the April 3, 2017, issue of National Review.
Employment in the U.S. has been inching back up from its low following the financial crisis. Even a slow and disappointing pace can eventually get you close to your destination. To be sure, the headline unemployment rate has not ventured above 5 percent for the year. But as my colleague Nicholas Eberstadt documented in his recent book, Men without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis, the low unemployment rate fails to capture the fact that the work rate has also been falling. Eberstadt argues that with one in six prime-working-age men not in the work force, the U.S. faces a crisis.
This shows the sense in which the unemployment rate can be misleading. Between 1990 and the financial crisis, around 63 percent of the population had a job. This percentage, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, dropped to around 58 percent during the crisis and remains at about 60 percent today. That means that fully 3 percent less of the population is gainfully employed today than in 1990.
A byproduct of the weak labor market has been very slow wage growth. Historically, tight labor markets have been the best news for the middle class. When unemployment is low, blue-collar wages rise. It’s possible that this time around, wages have not risen much as unemployment has dropped because discouraged workers who were out of the labor force have jumped back in. So it could be that, as the measured unemployment rate gets lower, wages will not advance as they have in the past.
It’s debatable when the labor market is “tight,” but just to pick a number, the attached chart defines the “wage gap” as the difference between the unemployment rate and 5 percent. I plotted the unemployment gap alongside wage growth. The civilian-unemployment rate comes from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis’s FRED databank and is seasonally adjusted to account for predictable variation. Meanwhile, the wage-growth rates are estimated by the Atlanta Federal Reserve Bank, using Restoring Work and Wages the Current Population Survey, and are smoothed out using a three-month average.
A pattern can be seen in the graph suggesting that this rough measure of the unemployment gap is inversely related to wage growth. When the unemployment gap falls, wages grow, and when unemployment spikes, as during the financial crisis, wage growth declines. At the end of the chart, wage growth appears to be picking up.
Given the large army of reserve workers who are on the sidelines, one can hope that the wage growth that has begun to be evident will encourage citizens to re-enter the labor force. If they do, then continued wage momentum may well require policy changes such as a corporate-tax reform to kick the economy into a higher gear. |
