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11 Sep, 6 tweets, 3 min read
Hey look, my favorite economist is testifying at the @WaysMeansCmte in Washington-ish in the next few minutes (around 12:15pm). She's got a lot to say about our way out of our current mess.

You can watch here on twitter (link below), or on youtube here:
SHE'S ON. More can't miss TV from C-SPAN filled with meaty econo-goodness.
twitter.com/i/broadcasts/1…
Betsey urges Congress to focus not on the changes but on the levels. The economy's in a funk, and it needs help.

TELL 'EM BETSEY.
The big problem: The labor market has moved on from temporary furloughs to growing permanent job loss. That'll cause the recession to drag... for years, says @BetseyStevenson.
"One essential way to help parents and reduce the risk is to ensure that you fight as hard for childcare and schools as you have for the airlines. The most important industry in a modern economy is high-quality child-care and education."
And if you missed @BetseyStevenson's made-for-tv congressional testimony today, you can read the highlights. (Spoiler: They're awesome.)

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More from @JustinWolfers

Justin Wolfers Profile picture
27 Aug
The Fed's announces tweaks to its monetary policy strategy.
federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pre…
I suspect Fed watchers will see this as big. It seems more like a gradual evolution to me.

There are three big changes, which I'll take in turn.
First, the Fed promises to focus on "shortfalls of employment", rather than "deviations" is just clarifying what it always meant.

Shortfalls matter for the employment part of the dual mandate.
But deviations matter for inflation.

So it retains the right to respond to deviations
Read 11 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
19 Aug
BIG NEWS. @BetseyStevenson & I are launching our own podcast: Think Like An Economist.

Before I tell you all about it, lemme urge you to subscribe, listen, and tell your friends.

iTunes: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/thi…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/show/4sOVMPFJm…
Himalaya: himalaya.com/econ
All of economics comes down to mastering a few basic principles and then applying them over and over. So how hard is it to learn economics? Not that hard.

In fact, we’re betting that we can teach economics in a series of snack-sized podcasts. @himalaya_app
We’re calling it Think Like an Economist because we want to teach you to, well... Think like an economist.

Look, we’re making a bold claim: You'll make better decisions and have fewer regrets if you learn to Think Like An Economist.
Read 9 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
7 Aug
Payrolls rose +1.8 million, and the unemployment rate is down from 11.1% to 10.2%.

The economy is still in a massive hole, but we're crawling back out. The problem is that the pace of improvement has slowed to a crawl.
Some context on today's payrolls report:
March -1.3 million
April -20.8 million!
May +2.7 million
June +4.8 million
July +1.8 million

We lost 22 million jobs at the outset of this thing.
We've since recovered 9 million jobs.
More than half of the dramatic job loss remains.
Today's unemployment rate of 10.2% is higher than at any point during the financial crisis.

Once you account for a technical misclassification problem (see notes below), unemployment is probably closer to 11%, which is the highest rate since the Great Depression.
Read 13 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
30 Jul
GDP for Q2 fell by 10%

That's bad. Really bad. As in the worst decline in quarterly GDP in recorded U.S. history.
Many headlines will say GDP fell 32.9%.

What they mean is that it fell at an annualized rate of -32.9% which is the result of a thought experiment asking how much lower would GDP be if the recent rate of decline persisted for a year.

But no-one thinks that'll happen. Ignore it
As horrific as the GDP number is, it's basically reporting something that we all already knew -- that economic activity came to a screeching halt as the virus altered the contours of our lives. Millions lost their jobs, and the real issue is how our economy recovers.
Read 12 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
2 Jul
4.8 million jobs returned in June; we're still 15 million in the hole.

Unemployment fell to 11.1%, but after accounting for misclassification, it's probably about 1 percentage point higher. So real unemployment fell from around 16% to 12%.
Today's employment news is from early/mid June, and therefore somewhat stale. It refers to probably the best point where all states had lifted shelter in place orders, but the second wave had yet to emerge.
A simple summary: The job market is truly dreadful; latest data show it’s somewhat less dreadful than before.
Read 16 tweets
Justin Wolfers Profile picture
9 Jun
This Chicago economist has angered a lot of his fellow econs.

His engagement with #blacklives matter is to not to engage the issues, but launch into a sophomoric debate about language, and to condescendingly try to ridicule the movement.

But it’s worse. It’s part of a pattern.
Uhlig’s first response to the protests doesn’t engage with the problems of racism. Rather he appears more upset about looting. He argues (without irony!) that those protesting police violence should be “scheduling demos in cooperation with authorities.”
Or in the wake of White Supremacists killing an anti-racism protestor in Charlottesville in 2017, you might think the problem was the white supremacists. But not, our Harald. He’s worried about the anti-racism protestors. Both sides, and all that. haralduhlig.blogspot.com/2017/08/is-new…
Read 19 tweets

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