May 2024 CPI Report: Can the US Economy Have it All?
The Consumer Price Index rose at a 3.3% annual pace in May 2024, and 3.4% for all items excluding food and energy. Three things stood out from this report. 1. Inflation Softens More Than Expected Overall, consumer prices were unchanged from April to May and rose by 3.3% over the past year. Core CPI, excluding ...
June 2024 Jobs Report: Entering a New Phase of the Job Market
The BLS estimated that the US economy added 206,000 jobs in June, with the unemployment rate ticking up from 4.0% to 4.1%. Three things stood out beneath the headlines of this report. 1. Revisions to April and May Show a Softer Job Market While the topline number of 206,000 jobs added in June was about ...
June 2024 CPI Report: The Summer Cooldown Continues
The Consumer Price Index rose at a 3.0% annual pace in June 2024, and 3.2% for all items excluding food and energy. Three things stood out from this report. 1. Core CPI Hits Lowest Level in Three Years While markets expected a small increase in prices from May to June, the Consumer Price Index declined ...
Rising Childlessness is Driving the Decline in Birth Rates in the United States
The United States has experienced a dramatic decline in birth rates, starting in 2007 and continuing through recent years. This post updates and expands on findings in Kearney, Levine, Pardue (2020), The Puzzle of Falling Birth Rates in the United States, which concludes that the decline in birth rates has been fueled more by a ...
July 2024 CPI Report: Trending Towards Two
The steady cooldown in inflation that has marked much of 2024 continued in July. The Consumer Price Index rose at a 2.9% annual pace for all items, and at a 3.2% pace for all items excluding food and energy. These headline and core inflation rates are now at their lowest points since March 2021 and ...
August 2024 Jobs Report: The Summer Slowdown Continues
The BLS estimated that the US economy added 142,000 jobs in August, and the unemployment rate ticked down slightly from 4.3% to 4.2%. This report is far from a worst-case-scenario many had feared, but does tell a consistent story of a labor market that is moving from a phase of post-pandemic normalization into outright weakness. ...
The Widening Economic and Social Gaps Between Young Men and Women
Recent social and economic data has revealed a troubling trend: young men in the US are increasingly falling behind their female peers, a long-widening gap that has accelerated in the wake of COVID-19. Many young men have struggled to navigate the disruptions associated with the pandemic, resulting in stagnating labor force participation rates, declining college ...
Protectionism is Failing and Wrongheaded: An Evaluation of the Post-2017 Shift toward Trade Wars and Industrial Policy
This paper evaluates the shift towards increasingly protectionist and nationalist policies carried out by the past two presidential administrations. In this paper, Michael Strain argues that the turn to such economic policies has not only been ineffective by its own standards, failing to raise employment and reduce America’s reliance on China, but also is more ...
Technological Disruption in the US Labor Market
DAVID DEMING, CHRISTOPHER ONG, LAWRENCE H. SUMMERS This paper explores past episodes of technological disruption in the US labor market, with the goal of learning lessons about the likely future impact of artificial intelligence (AI). The authors measure changes in the structure of the US labor market going back over a century in two ways. ...