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1/ My op-ed @WashingtonPost today tackles a question I hear often: Why do we have to worry about the American worker, with unemployment below 4%? I think it's a serious mistake to confuse a cyclical boom with a long-term secular trend. Let me explain. washingtonpost.com/opinions/ameri…
2/ All the good economic data is indeed good, and worth celebrating. But we've been here before and we'll be here again. One could have asked the same question in 2007, or in 2000, but as we know now the labor market's underlying fundamentals were on a downward trajectory.
3/ One way to see this is to compare current performance to prior cyclical peaks. The present looks much better than the recession. But metrics like labor force participation keep getting worse. The share of prime-age men without full-time work keeps rising from boom to boom. 
4/ Most strikingly, the share of prime-age men without full-time work in 2018 is higher than at the depths of pre-2007 recessions. By the 1986-2006 standard (that's when the dataset starts), 2018 looks worse than the bottom of a recession!
5/ A similar picture emerges for wages. Yes, wages are growing right now, and that's good. But we're still climbing out of the hole of weak nominal wage growth dug by the last recession. wsj.com/articles/wages…
6/ And looking specifically at production and nonsupervisory workers (for whom there also happens to be more historical data), we're just barely reaching past the average nominal growth rate for the past couple decades and still nowhere near the growth rates of prior booms.
7/ I think the best way to understand the labor market's experience is as bumps on a downward slope. Picture a sledding hill studded with jumps. The ride is filled with exhilarating upward surges, but the landing point keeps getting lower and you end up at the bottom.
8/ The current data does give real cause for hope: it shows that nothing about automation is precluding full employment, that the industrial sector remains vital even in a services economy, and that gains are still possible for all kinds of workers in all regions.
9/ But a tight labor market isn't a solution. For one thing, it doesn't last forever. For another, if wage gains are not paired with productivity gains they will eventually be inflated away. We can't just keep doing the same things and expect the long-run trajectory to change.
10/ Thus, there's no time like the present to be talking about the underlying structural conditions in our society that influence our labor market and will dictate outcomes for the next generation across the booms and busts that will inevitably occur.
11/11 That's what The Once and Future Worker is about -- trying to understand what choices led to the labor market's unsatisfactory trajectory in recent decades and what changes we'll need to make if we want the next 40 years to be better than the last 40. bit.ly/theonceandfutu…
