In his May 13 Upshot blog post for the New York Times, "Labor Market Seems Dented, Not Broken," Ford School Professor Justin Wolfers argues for a sunnier outlook on labor market prospects.
"The darker view," says Wolfers, "is that the Great Recession wrought permanent damage." After the Great Recession, unemployment rates and job openings rose in tandem, says Wolfers, "suggesting that the labor market had become worse at matching workers with vacant jobs."
But this may be the natural course of a recession, he suggests. In the past two years, "the unemployment rate has fallen almost two percentage points…while the job vacancy rate hasn't budged."
Justin Wolfers is a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Michigan and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. He is a regular contributor to The New York Times blog, The Upshot.