In January 2001, the nonfarm quits rate — the percentage of the nonfarm workforce deciding to leave their jobs in a given month — stood at 2.6 percent. During the recession, the quits rate fell to 1.3 percent; since then, it has mostly but not fully recovered to its pre-recession peak, which itself was lower than the rates seen in the early 2000s:

The Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program is expected to completely deplete its trust fund by late 2016. If the program’s funding isn’t increased, benefit cuts of about 20 percent will automatically go into place.

In the past, Congress has reallocated revenues between Social Security’s Disability Insurance fund and its Old Age and Survivors Insurance (OASI) fund when one program was facing financial difficulties. Reallocating funding from the OASI fund to the DI fund would not significantly impact the solvency of the OASI fund: while the OASI trust fund has a projected reserve depletion date of 2035, the combined Old Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASDI) trust fund has an expected depletion date of 2034. This means that keeping the DI trust fund solvent for another 18 years would decrease the solvency of the OASI fund from 20 years to 19 years.

Alexander Main et Dan BeetonJacobin, 29 septembre, 2015

I see that my co-author Jared Bernstein has been pondering this question. While this sort of thinking can get you thrown out of the church of mainstream economics, I think that he is very much on the mark. Let me throw out a few reasons.

First, there is an issue about the money available to firms to invest. While larger and more established firms likely to have little problem financing investment in the current low interest rate environment, smaller and newer firms may find it difficult to get access to capital. For them a rapidly growing economy can be strong sales growth and higher profits, both of which are strongly linked to investment. This is a finding from an old paper by my friend Steve Fazzari and Glenn Hubbard (yes, that Glenn Hubbard.)

A second reason why productivity can be tied to growth is that firms will have more incentive to adopt labor saving equipment in a context of a rapidly growing economy. When they see additional demand for their products, they have to find a way to meet it. Of course they can hire more workers or have the existing workforce put in more hours, but another option is to find a way to produce more with the same amount of labor. Of course profit maximizing firms should always be trying to produce more with the same amount of labor, but they may not follow the economics textbook. Meeting increased demand can give them more incentive to do so.

A third reason is changes in the mix of output. At any point in time we have many high paying high productivity jobs and many low paying low productivity jobs. When we have a strong labor market, people go from the low paying, low productivity jobs to the higher paying high productivity jobs. This means that many people now working at fast food restaurants, the midnight shift at a convenience store, or as greeters at Walmart will instead find better paying jobs in a strong labor market leaving these low-productivity jobs unfilled.

The rapid growth of jobs in low-paying sectors in this recovery has been widely noted. Rather than reflecting an intrinsic feature of the economy, this could be the result of the failure of demand to create enough growth in the high-paying sectors. This is again a story where the causation goes from growth and low unemployment to high productivity.

Does competition from immigrants lower the pay of less-educated native born workers? On its face, the obvious answer would be yes — competition lowers prices, and the price of labor is not special. However, the macroeconomy is not quite that simple. For o

Health researchers have noted an oddity in the relationship between healthcare spending and life expectancy: while greater spending is generally associated with greater life expectancy, average life expectancy in the U.S. isn’t even close to what we’d predict given its level of healthcare spending. As can be seen in Figure 1, which depicts life expectancy and healthcare spending for all OECD countries and countries counted as “advanced economies” by the IMF, the U.S. is a clear outlier when it comes to healthcare spending and life expectancy (the U.S. is highlighted in red):

Jake Johnston
VICE News, October 26, 2015

Eileen AppelbaumThe Hill, October 26, 2015

Dean Baker
Al Jazeera America, October 26, 2015

Dean Baker
Truthout, October 26, 2015