Sometimes I get the sense from other economists that those focused on labor market slack should move on, and why are we so frustrated anyway? Let me give you an example why...
Mary Daly president of the SF Fed has a new short piece out in which she discusses how she learned that unemployment was not capturing labor market slack. She says she learned this from listening to people unfamiliar with the phillips curve, business and community leaders..
She says this was necessary because models, history, and traditional said nothing about this. 
But economists familiar with and indeed expanding upon the Phillips curve approach have been arguing U did not capture slack since at least 2014. To be unfamiliar with this vast empirical body of work and while spending a decade making hawkish proclamations is... frustrating
Indeed I have written multiple pieces debunking Daly’s multiple works of hawkish analysis over this recovery. So if it seems like some economists are a bit frustrated with how the discourse around labor markets this last decade has gone, this incident is a microcosm of why.
If you weren’t familiar with this wide lit before the Fed Listens events, you weren’t doing your job as a high ranking & influential economist in the Fed system
This bad history also matters because the truth was clear in the data and was missed due to analytical mistakes. Claiming the knowledge was only available via qualitative discussions is an excuse for poor empiricism, and provides the wrong lesson for the future. The data spoke
The economic history of this decade needs to be written or we won’t learn any of this
