This winter, colds and the flu have been hanging on an on. It seems as if the recovery from these afflictions happens at the pace of a glacier melting. Coincidentally, that seems to be the pace of employment recovery in the U.S.
From the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Drs. Russ Roberts and John Taylor of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University put this together.
At Econbrowser, there is a post... The Myth of 'Jobless Recoveries... that disputes the idea that the recovery has been jobless.
Why have the last three recoveries been viewed as jobless, while previous recoveries were not? This is because the speed of recoveries has been slower than before. In the early 1990s and early 2000s, as well as after the Great Recession, slow growth meant that sizable output gaps persisted well into the recovery. In contrast, in most earlier recessions, the output trough was followed by a period of above-normal growth that pulled output back to its previous trend.
In other words, unemployment has stayed high because GDP [output] has not recovered to the pre-recession trend... in other other words, we are having a recovery-less recovery. Of course, they wouldn't put it in those terms. What terms would you use?
Let's hope we don't have four more years.