Jobonomics

Time to play Hypothetical Economics!

So here's the job situation in the US: last month we only lost 11,000 jobs. Because our workforce is growing (because our population is growing), we need to add 100,000 jobs a month to keep unemployment stable. Krugman did a nice write-up of this yesterday, suggesting that we need to add 300,000 jobs a month for the next five years to get back up to speed.

So, according to Krugman, an aggressive approach would get us up to a regular employment level in five years. But we're not taking an aggressive approach, we've decided to let the job situation sort itself out more organically, and some are saying that it will take about ten years.

So here's my question: isn't the business cycle only about ten years long to begin with? Are we seriously looking at getting things normalized just in the time for the next recession? And the broader question: the whole time I've been in the workforce, the talk on the street has been that job market is in the toilet. The whole time! And I've been out of college for six years now.

This seem broken to anyone else?

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