Word: okun
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...confession of why our present economic moment is fraught with both danger and opportunity. There appears to be, Summers told the suddenly very attentive crowd, a strange bit of physics working itself out in our economy. The problem is related to a hiccup in an economic rule called Okun's law. First mooted by economist Arthur Okun in 1962, the law (it's 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...
...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...
...back. Workers had to move to the industrial sector, a transition helped by the demands of a war. It was massive national hysteresis. Sound familiar? "A lot of the jobs that have been lost will never come back," the Peterson Institute's Kirkegaard says. Which means that hiccup in Okun's law is a warning: growth alone won't employ America again...
...Chosen as Arthur Okun Distinguished Fellow in Economics, Globalization and Governance at the Brookings Institution...
Summers has been appointed the Arthur Okun Distinguished Fellow in Economics, Globalization and Governance at the Brookings Institute, one of the nation's preeminent liberal think tanks...