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> “The economy is already at full employment.”

On a recent EconTalk[1], Edward Glaeser, the Fred and Eleanor Glimp Professor of Economics at Harvard, said, in their recent sample, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 have been jobless for over 12 months.

EDIT: quick googling, 11.9% of U.S. men aged 25-55 is about 7.5 million people.

http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2018/03/edward_glaeser.html

But problems 1 and 2 are the same for the official unemployment metric in times past as well.

1. If the person has stopped looking for a job, their likelihood of resuming their job-seeking is pretty low. That's especially true for the unusually large aging baby-boomer population who are taking an early retirement rather than seeking re-employment.

2. While that's clearly another indicator of the strength of the job market, it is hard to argue that no job is better than a job which isn't ideal for skill/pay reasons. If you have a suggestion on how to accurately measure this that'd be great.

Who knew that a single number was insufficient to measure something as complex as employment? Yeah, we need to look at the larger picture, but it's hard to say we have exceptionally low unemployment AND that this is a good time for a stimulus.

But problems 1 and 2 are the same for the official unemployment metric in times past as well.

Absolutely. Don't get me wrong... I'm not arguing for or against any specific policy in the post above, or making any particular claim regarding Bernanke's argument. I just wanted to point out that saying "we're at full employment" is at least a little bit questionable as an assertion, at least if we take "full employment" to represent a situation where lack of available labor represents a threat to the economy, vis-a-vis other policy issues.

Maybe I'm just picking nits with this observation, but that jumped out me for some reason, when I was reading the article.

But "full employment" is widely considered to be a sub 5.0% unemployment rate.

> at least if we take "full employment" to represent a situation where lack of available labor represents a threat to the economy, vis-a-vis other policy issues.

I believe that there are officially fewer unemployed people than there are open jobs in the US [1]. Not sure if that's the kind of "threat" you're looking for, but it qualifies, as a risk at least.

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/06/news/economy/us-job-openings...

“The economy is already at full employment.”

I'm not sure that's actually true. Yes, the govt. reported "official" unemployment number is 3.8% or whatever. BUT...

Upvoted your post. You are correct to be skeptical here. In fact there are even people at the Fed who don't agree with the assertion. Current President of the Minneapolis Fed has publicly stated that Labor Force Participation Rate would be a better measure. As I'm sure you can imagine, that isn't a popular view w/i certain circles.

While Ben may truly believe what he's saying, I mostly get the sense that he's trying to burnish his 'legacy'.

Also don’t forget that a huge percentage of the job growth has been in the tenuousness of the “gig economy,” famous for its workers committing suicide in public as a desperate appeal for acknowledgement of their hardship.

The BLS compiles six unemployment numbers, of which U-3 is routinely reported. U-6 covers the factors you mention and is approximately double U-3. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Do you know how the government might acquire the data you're looking for? #3 is easy, #1 and #2 seem more in the domain of private surveyors that are more like pollsters and taking voluntary data sets to proxy the big picture. That has its own problems, of course.

#3 is clearly happening in tech.

There is already data collected on at least (2) and(3) of those points, although I can't tell you all of the details from memory, as far as who collects it, how it's collected, the frequency, etc. But I can clearly recall reading recent (and less recent) articles on economic issues that cited data reflecting underemployment, and wage growth.

There's a lot of interesting information here[1] regarding what employment related data is collected and reported by the BLS.

[1]: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/03/07/employment-v...

#3 is clearly happening in tech.

True, and a handful of other areas as well. But that's still only a portion of the overall economy.

> that comes with a couple of big, big caveats...

Which have been dusted off again now that a Republican is in office.

> Those numbers by definition don't include job-seekers who have left the market and quit being job-seekers. IOW, people who became so despondent that they gave up.

There's a large pool of people who gave up searching for jobs, and that happened under Obama. It was years of feeling helpless that swung so many Democrats in the rust belt to vote for Trump. Obama's policies greatly benefited coastal areas, DC was a boom town the entire time for instance, while simply ignoring large swaths of the country.

They were brought up all the time when Obama was in office too.