Robert Taggart

Employment and earnings inadequacy : a new social indicator

The employment and unemployment measures gathered by the United States Bureau of the Census and published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics are the most complete and comprehensive labor-force data developed by any nation. The technical excellence, however, has not made these labor-force data immune from criticism. Taking exception to the conditions reported by the government bureaus, some detractors have blamed the messenger for the message, charging that the reported excessive unemployment is a cabal hatched by bureaucrats to scare the public into supporting new social programs which would expand the power of the federal bureaucracy. Wild as these charges may seem, President John F. Kennedy apparently believed that labor-force statistics, like Caesars wife, should be above suspicion. To maintain public confidence in the data and to allay any distrust, he appointed a prestigious investigatory committee headed by Robert Aaron Gordon, the eminent economist who is currently president-elect of the American Economic Association. The committee proclaimed the innocence of the data collectors and proceeded to praise them for their excellent work in measuring employment and unemployment. Eleven years have elapsed since the Gordon Committee made its recommendations. The intervening

Young Adults in Economic Depression: The Case for a Young Adult Jobs Creation Program

Popular indicators are not sufficient to tell us the state of the economy. The authors show that, beneath the employment data, young adults in particular have suffered in the recent recession. In fact, they lost all the hard-won gains of the late 1990s. Is it time for a job creation program?