In the US, unemployment has fallen to a five decade low, while in the UK it is at its lowest level since 1974. These headline figures suggest that both countries are close to full employment – and that wage pressure should be building. And yet, real pay growth in both countries remains weak by historic standards and concerns about the quality of work abound.
Is there more to the transatlantic jobs miracle than meets the eye? And with a significant number of Americans giving up on looking for work at all, are the differences as big as the similarities between the UK and US experiences?
To debate these issues, the Resolution Foundation is hosting an event to mark the launch of ‘Not Working’, a new book by economist and former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee member David "Danny" Blanchflower. Danny will be joined by TUC Head of Economics Kate Bell and RF Director Torsten Bell to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of labour markets on both sides of the Atlantic, what lessons countries can learn from each other, and how we can improve both the quantity and quality of work.
Speakers
David Blanchflower, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College
Kate Bell, Head of Economics and Social Affairs at the TUC
Torsten Bell, Director of the Resolution Foundation
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The ‘Transatlantic jobs miracle’: What lies behind and beneath it?
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June 19@resfoundation 1#notworking
The ‘Transatlantic jobs miracle’?
What lies behind and beneath it
Book launch for ‘Not Working’ by David Blanchflower
David Blanchflower, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College
Kate Bell, Head of Economics and Social Affairs at the TUC
(Chair) Torsten Bell, Director of the Resolution Foundation
2. • On its website, Gallup says the following: “Here is
one of Gallup’s most important discoveries since its
founding in 1935: what the whole world wants is a
good job.”
• This book is about jobs, decent jobs that pay well
and the lack of them.
• Low earnings and the loss of high-paying jobs have
led to feelings of instability, insecurity, and
helplessness, especially for the less educated.
• In this book, I will show how the rise of right-wing
populism has been driven by developments in labor
markets and by the failure of the elites to get
economic policy right.
3. A few relevant papers
• With Andrew Oswald, Unhappiness an pain in modern America: a review essay and further evidence on Carol
Graham’s Happiness for all’, Journal of Economic Literature, June 2019
• With David Bell, 'Underemployment in Europe and the United States’, forthcoming in Industrial and Labor
Relations Review.
• With David Bell, 'The Well-being of the overemployed and the underemployed and the rise in depression in the
UK’, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, June 2019
• With David Bell, 'The lack of wage growth and the falling NAIRU', National Institute Economic Review,
August, 2018.
• With David Bell, 'Underemployment and the lack of wage pressure in the UK', National Institute Economic
Review, February, 2018.
• With David Bell, ‘Labour market slack in the UK’, National Institute Economic Review, August, 2014.
• With David Bell, ‘Underemployment in the UK revisited’, National Institute Economic Review 224 : May, 2013.
• With David Bell, ‘UK underemployment in the Great Recession’, National Institute Economic Review 215:
January, 2011.
4. "For it is a possibility that the duration of the slump may be much
more prolonged than most people are expecting and much will be
changed both in our ideas and in our methods before we emerge.
Not, of course the duration of the acute phase of the slump, but that
of the long, dragging conditions of semi-slump, or at least sub-
normal prosperity, which may be expected to succeed the acute
phase”.
Keynes, J.M. (1931), ‘An economic analysis of unemployment’, in Unemployment as a World Problem, edited by Q.
Wright and J.M. Keynes, University of Chicago Press.
The long dragging conditions of semi-slump
5. Beveridge, 1960 – “full employment has been
accomplished”
• “In 1944 as a guide to the amount of such temporary idleness as we might expect
under full employment, I suggested a figure of 3%, of the total labour force idle
at any time.
• Maynard Keynes, when he saw this figure, wrote to me that that there was no
harm in aiming at 3%, but that he would be surprised if we got so low in
practice.
• In fact during the 12 years 1948-1959 the average unemployment rate for Britain
taking all industries together, has been not 3% but half of that, 1.55% in exact
terms.
• Full employment is here. This is probably the single largest cause of British
prosperity today.”
6. Pain, Immigration, and Politics
• Recessions, slow recoveries, and policy mistakes have consequences.
• Pain is up, depression and stress are up.
• Binge drinking is up, obesity is up, and drug addiction is up.
• Hopelessness is up; anxiety is up.
• Deaths of despair from alcohol, drug poisoning and suicide are up.
• America now has a massive opioid crisis, with 72,000 dying of opioid
drug overdoses in 2017, up nearly 7 percent from 2016.
• Death toll higher than the yearly death totals from HIV, car crashes, or
firearms.
7. Table 9. Changes over time in the probability of being depressed, UK
All Workers Underemployed
2005 1.5 0.7 1.0
2006 1.4 0.7 1.1
2007 1.5 0.7 1.1
2008 1.5 0.8 1.1
2009 1.5 0.8 1.3
2010 1.6 1.0 1.5
2011 1.7 1.0 1.4
2012 1.9 1.2 1.9
2013 2.0 1.4 2.2
2014 2.4 1.8 2.7
2015 2.7 2.1 3.2
2016 2.9 2.3 3.8
2017 3.3 2.8 4.5
2018 3.6 3.1 4.8
Source: Bell And Blanchflower, ‘The Well-being of the Overemployed and the Underemployed and the Rise
in Depression in the UK’, JEBO June 2019.
8. Right-wing Populism
• Recessions, slow recoveries, and policy mistakes have resulted in
moves to right-wing populism around the world
• Votes for Trump, Brexit and Le Pen were from areas that had high
unemployment rates, high heavy drinking, suicide and obesity rates.
• There has been a rise in deaths of despair in the United States
especially for the less-educated from drug overdoses, drinking and
suicide.
• Sir Angus Deaton has warned this is now coming to the UK
• Life expectancy has fallen for the last two years in the US and the
UK
14. y = 1.9753x + 3.5749
R² = 0.336
0
5
10
15
20
25
30
35
40
6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14
LePen%
Unemployment rate
Le Pen vote and the unemployment rate
15. UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston on Austerity in the UK
• “Much of the glue that has held British society together since WW2
has been deliberately removed and replaced with a harsh and
uncaring ethos….
• The basic message delivered in the language of managerial
efficiency and automation is that almost any alternative will be more
tolerable than seeking to obtain government benefits.
• This is a very far cry from any notion of a social contract, Beveridge
model or otherwise, let alone of social human rights.
• As Thomas Hobbes observed long ago, such an approach condemns
the least well off to lives that are “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and
short”.
16. I worried on March 28, 2008, about what might
happen:
“My concern would be one should make sure one is
ahead of the curve so that later one is not in a position
where something horrible happens, I do not want that
to occur. My risks are to the downside and I have
concerns that something horrible might come and I do
not want that to happen.”
Sadly, something horrible did happen.
18. Q22008 Q32008 Q42008 Q12009 Q22009 Q32009
July 2008 0.2
August 2008 0
October 2008 0 −0.5
December 2008 0 -0.6
January 2009 0 −0.6 −1.5
April 2009 0 -0.7 -1.6 -1.9
July 2009 -0.1 -0.7 -1.8 -2.4 -0.8
October 2009 -0.1 -0.7 -1.8 -2.5 -0.6 -0.4
September 2011 −1.3 −2.0 −2.3 -1.6 -0.2 0.3
August 2012 −0.9 −1.8 −2.1 -1.5 -0.2 0.4
May 2019 −0.7 −1.6 −2.2 -1.7 -0.2 0.1
You don’t know where you are, you don’t know where you have been and you don’t know where you are going
(UK GDP Revisions for Q22008-Q22009)
19. August 2008 GDP projection based on market interest rate
expectations
20. August 2011 MPC Forecast GDP projection based on market
interest rate expectations and £200 billion asset purchases
21. • “I have previously argued, as have countless others, that the
usefulness of policymakers (or macroeconomists more generally)
should not be measured by their ability to forecast recessions, in the
same way that the usefulness of doctors is not measured by their
ability to forecast heart attacks. Instead, the usefulness of
policymakers lies in their response to a recession when it is
happening, and their understanding of general risk factors
beforehand, just as the usefulness of a doctor lies in her treatment of
a heart attack once it is happening, and her prescriptions for a healthy
lifestyle to reduce the risk of a heart attack beforehand.”
• “I find it hard to believe that cutting interest rates by a small amount
a few months before the MPC actually did, would have made much
difference to how the economy responded to the recession.”
Jan Vlieghe Commentary on my book, June 11th 2019
22. Vleighe “in real time, it was in fact not “obvious”, even to Blanchflower, that the
recession was coming, according to his own detailed version of events.”
In a speech on April 28th 2008 I said
“The United States seems to have moved into recession around the start of 2008”
and
“Developments in the UK are starting to look eerily similar to those in the United
States six months or so ago. There has been no decoupling of the two economies:
contagion is in the air. The United States sneezed and the UK is rapidly catching
its cold. . . . I have identical concerns for the UK. Generally, forecasters have
tended to underpredict the depth and duration of cyclical slowdowns.”
“Some commentators have argued that the MPC should have been more
aggressive in cutting interest rates in order to head off the downside risks. I
agree. My biggest concern right now is that the credit crisis will trigger a rapid
downward spiral in activity. Now it is time to get ahead of the curve.”
23. “I spend approximately half of my time in the United Kingdom and half in
the United States and so I am probably quite well placed to make the
comparison. For some time now I have been gloomy about prospects in
the United States, which now seems clearly to be in recession.
I believe there are a number of similarities between the United Kingdom
and the United States which suggest that in the United Kingdom we are
also going to see a substantial decline in growth, a pickup in
unemployment, little if any growth in real wages, and declining
consumption growth driven primarily by significant declines in house
prices.
The credit crunch is starting to hit and hit hard. “
My speech in Edinburgh, April 28th 2008
26. “It is true that for several years the MPC wage forecasts were too
optimistic, as were the MPC’s productivity forecasts. But the
forecasts were for wage growth to pick up gradually from 2% to
3% and sometimes to 4% several years into the future. Hardly an
explosion of wages. More importantly, for most of that period the
MPC did not actually raise interest rates”
Vlieghe on MPC’s wage forecasts – no problem we didn’t believe them..!
27. Why has wage growth been weak?
• GR exposed underlying economic weaknesses and displayed to the populace
the possibility of catastrophic declines in house prices and pension pots.
• Globalization has weakened worker’s bargaining power.
• Migrant flows have put downward pressure on wages and greased the wheels of
the labor market as their presence increased mobility. In UK since July 2004 2.7
million from theA8* have registered for NINOs. Since January 2014, 900,000
from theA2** have registered for NINOs. They have lowered the NAIRU
• Central banks have overestimated the NAIRU, which has fallen. Raising rates by
the Fed in 2017 and 2018 was a mistake.
• Labor market slack remains elevated especially from underemployment.
• Economies are slowing around the world – Germany, Italy, France and China
*A8 =Estonia; Latvia; Lithuania, Slovenia, Slovakia; Czech Republic; Hungary; Czech Republic and Poland. **A2= Bulgaria and Romania
31. Underemployment is the new measure of labor market slack
• Large numbers of part-time workers around the world, both those who choose to be part-time
and those who are there involuntarily and would prefer a full-time job report they want more
hours.
• When recession hit in most countries the number of hours of those who said they wanted
more hours, rose sharply and there was a fall in the number of hours that full-timers wanted
their hours reduced by.
• Even though the unemployment rate has returned to its pre-recession levels in many advanced
countries, underemployment in most has not.
• We also find evidence for the US that falls in the home ownership rate have helped to keep
wage pressure in check.
• Underemployment replaces unemployment as the main influence on wages in the years since
the Great Recession. This largely explains the lack of wage pressure and why central banks
have been wrong.
35. Table 6. Time series log wage equations in a quarterly region panel, UK, 2002–17
Hourly pay
Log Waget–4 0.0999 (3.43) 0.0991 (3.41) 0.0990 (3.41)
Log unemployment ratet–1 0.0092 (0.72) 0.0140 (1.10) 0.0089 (0.68)
Log # extra hours wanted –.0417 (3.02) –0.0398 (2.91) –0.0446 (3.18)
Constant 1.8898 1.8496 1.8784
Adjusted R2 0.9201 0.9206 0.9206
N 1260 1260 1260
Source: LFS.
Notes: all equations include a full set of region and wave dummies.
Source: Bell and Blanchflower “The lack of wage growth and the falling NAIRU’, National Institute Economic Review
No. 245 August 2018
41. “Mario Draghi is preparing to cut interest rates and embark on a
fresh round of bond purchases before he leaves the European
Central Bank this autumn, in a bid to boost the eurozone’s
economy and combat mounting global uncertainty over trade.
He specifically mentioned a fresh expansion of the bank’s €2.6tn
quantitative easing programme and rate cuts as possibilities, but
insisted that the central bank’s efforts would need to be matched by
a boost in public spending by the region’s governments.”
‘Mario Draghi prepares fresh stimulus as economic fears grow. ECB floats
renewal of bond-buying and joins US Fed in considering rate cuts’
Claire Jones, FT, 6th June 2019
42. Conclusions
• This US recovery became the longest ever in June 2019 and is likely to end due
to mistaken rate rises.
• The NAIRU everywhere seems around 2.5% not 4.5%
• Trade war seems to have slowed the global economy – China, Germany, Italy
Austria slowed already. UK PMIs weak and output data weakening.
• Fed overestimated impact of the stimulus. US economy is slowing. NFP weak
at 75k.
• Wage growth slowed in the UK and the US in the latest data
43. “We didn’t know where we were. We didn’t know where we
had been, and we didn’t know where we were going.”
Same as now.”
David Blanchflower
Bloomberg View
May 30th 2019
44.
45. Wifi: 2QAG_Guest Password: Welcome_Guests
June 19@resfoundation 45#notworking
The ‘Transatlantic jobs miracle’?
What lies behind and beneath it
Book launch for ‘Not Working’ by David Blanchflower
David Blanchflower, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth College
Kate Bell, Head of Economics and Social Affairs at the TUC
(Chair) Torsten Bell, Director of the Resolution Foundation
46. 46
Reasons to be cheerful – majority of recent jobs growth has been
in high-paying occupations
Percentage change in share of employment: 2008 - 18
Chart labels
@resfoundationNotes/Source: RF analysis of ONS, Labour Force Survey
47. 47
Reasons to be worried – job mobility is lower, particularly among
young private renters
Proportion of 25-34 year olds moving home in year, by tenure (two-year rolling average): UK
@resfoundationNotes: Year indicates latest year, e.g.1997=1996-97. Adults in parents’ home includes full-time students. Tenure indicates that in which adult currently lives.
Source: RF analysis of ONS, Labour Force Survey
48. 48
The big picture (I) - pay growth will struggle until sustained
productivity growth returns
Average change in real labour productivity and real average wages: UK
@resfoundationSource: ONS, National Accounts
49. 49
The big picture (II) – the US and the UK are not the same,
particularly if you’re female worker
Prime age (25-54), labour market participation rate: US & UK
@resfoundationSource: ONS, Labour Force Statistics, BLS (LNS11300061, LNS11300061, LNS11300062)