, Columnist
Stop Misreading U.S. Job Scene: It's Tight and Getting Tighter
Fed Chair Jerome Powell should look beyond wrongheaded arguments and get monetary policy back to neutral.
Labor is getting scarcer.
Sarah Blesener/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Flawed interpretations of the American labor market have become too widespread. And, perhaps, intentional.
Any objective reading of the data implies that labor is scarce, risking faster inflation and higher-than-anticipated interest rates. The most common misreadings are that the declines in the worker-to-population ratio and the labor force participation rates imply there are still plenty of people available to be hired. It's also asserted that the drop in the unemployment rate to 4.1 percent is only because these people have given up seeking work, so they aren't counted among the unemployed -- an intentionally misleading and highly deceptive explanation.