Word: gas
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...really more of a rule of thumb) says that when the economy grows, it produces jobs at a predictable rate, and when it shrinks, it sheds them at a similarly regular pace. It's a labor version of how the accelerator on your car works: add gas, go faster; less gas, go slower...
...What made Summers' frank comment important is that it suggests this just-add-gas relationship may now be malfunctioning. The American economy has been shedding jobs much, much faster than Okun's law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. "I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd - deviating again from his text - "that anyone fully understands this phenomenon." And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that...
...rely on traditional strategies: if we create demand through growth, cheap money and massive government spending, then some jobs will return. In the meantime, train people for whatever work they can get - fast food, nursing, you name it. But if we're in a posthysteresis world, then just adding gas to the economy won't be enough, and making cheap low-end jobs won't deliver a workforce capable of sustaining competitive growth. "There's no use making economic change if you don't have human agents who can take advantage of it," Unger explains...
...down strike at GM's Fisher body plant that established industrial-labor-organizing rights in America. But she saw her father and uncle go down with the automakers. "When they shut down the Fisher plant [in 1987], everything within a two-to-three-block radius closed down: bars, restaurants, gas stations, banks. Because I lived through the '80s up there in Flint, I just had a feeling that something wasn't right," she says. Since December, Eaton has idled 99 of its 289 Roxboro employees. (See pictures of people out of work in America...
...those polled said they would be willing to pay $2,000 more for a car that gets 35 m.p.g. than for a similar one that gets only 25 m.p.g. Of course, consumers are doing their own doing-well-by-doing-good calculation: a more expensive car that gets better gas mileage will save them money in the long run - and make them feel good about it in the process...