Commentary My private theory is that we never really left the recession that began March 2020 with lockdowns. Real household income and labor participation still haven’t recovered. Productivity has crawled along but within the range of statistical error. No question that the U.S. economy has downshifted. Whatever pathetic growth we experience now barely registers as…

Commentary With labor participation rates still far below pre-lockdown norms, and with the rising investment we should be seeing, one might suppose job openings would be growing. Trends are going in the opposite direction. Job openings for March fell the most they have in two years. This data, however, needs to be unpacked a bit…

Experts say and studies suggest that generous federal pandemic unemployment benefits reduced the U.S. labor participation rate, contributing to business difficulties in finding workers. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted a decline in the workforce participation rate through 2021. The BLS cited a study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, “Has the Willingness to Work…

America’s low labor participation rate since the COVID pandemic has become a problem for the U.S. economy, according to experts. Economists are saying that an unprecedented drop in labor participation throughout the United States after the pandemic hit in 2020 has become widely noticeable. Health concerns, harmful reactions to the COVID vaccines, lockdowns, and stimulus…

Commentary As the midterms approach, one way of looking at America’s current disaster is that we, the American people, were lab rats. And since 2021, the Left were the mad scientists, eager to try out their crackpot leftist experiments on us. The result is that the housing market is tottering on the verge of collapse….

Commentary On April 15, 2020, a full month after the President’s fateful news conference that greenlighted lockdowns to be enacted by the states for “15 Days to Flatten the Curve,” Donald Trump had a revealing White House conversation with Anthony Fauci, the head of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Disease who had already…

Commentary The first time I heard the phrase “pink collar worker” was two days ago from The Atlantic, which published fascinating data on what it describes as mass burnout among nurses, childcare workers, teachers, and other women-dominated professions. The phrase itself dates from the 1970s—the female version of “blue collar” one supposes—and I’m oddly surprised…

Commentary It was good, or at least fascinating, while it lasted. The labor shortage is ending. In the entirety of the post-lockdown period, labor markets have been behaving strangely. We’ve seen incredibly low unemployment numbers (3.6 percent) that everyone has known do not tell the whole story. That figure only calculates people in the market…

Strung out on drugs half her life, Brandi Edwards, 29, said the longest she held a job before getting sober four years ago was “about two and a half months.” “I worked at an AT&T call center, a day-care center for a month, fast food places, but I had to take drugs to get out…

Commentary It looks as if we can add another line to the long list of lockdown harms. Sloth. This explains so much actually. For months, we’ve been watching working/population ratios and labor participation rates and have been stunned by how they both continue to plummet. We search for explanations. Early retirement. Women driven out due…