Word: peterson
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...Gone are the days when he would glibly compare flailing financial markets to jet crashes, as he did to TIME in 1999. He is mindful of how ill-considered asides by policymakers can cause financial-market angina. So you can probably imagine the ripple that ran through the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington in July when Summers looked up from his prepared speech, flashed a grin and loosed the sort of utterance that once upon a time marked imminent indiscretion. "There was," he told the room, "a fight about whether I was allowed to say this now that...
...much, much faster than Okun's law predicts. According to that rough rule, we should be at about 8.5% unemployment today, not slipping toward 10%. Something new and possibly strange seems to be happening in this recession. Something unpredicted by the experts. "I don't think," Summers told the Peterson Institute crowd - deviating again from his text - "that anyone fully understands this phenomenon." And that raises some worrying questions. Will creating jobs be that much slower too? Will double-digit unemployment persist even after we emerge from this recession? Has the idea of full employment rather suddenly become antiquated...
...afford to wait. The longer someone is unemployed, the harder it is to get back to work, a fact as true for the nation as it is for you and me. As the Peterson Institute's Jacob Kirkegaard explains, "It is entirely possible that what started as a cyclical rise in unemployment could end up as an entrenched problem." Past crises have illustrated that lesson: the longer you wait, the harder it is to contain. This is as true for joblessness as it was for subprime mortgages, al-Qaeda and computer viruses...
...structural. The jobs people lost - largely in agriculture - never came back. Workers had to move to the industrial sector, a transition helped by the demands of a war. It was massive national hysteresis. Sound familiar? "A lot of the jobs that have been lost will never come back," the Peterson Institute's Kirkegaard says. Which means that hiccup in Okun's law is a warning: growth alone won't employ America again...
Studies like Cohen's help ground a young and sometimes fluffy field in hard science, says conference chairman Chris Peterson of the University of Michigan. "It's very, very careful, creative research," he says, while conceding, "There's a temptation to bullshit in positive psychology...