Greg Mankiw
passes along the following image:
And the following analysis:
At face value, it indicates the labor market is almost back to normal. If so, this fact suggests that the Fed may soon need to back off its policy of near zero interest rates, and that the slow pace of economic growth experienced in recent years reflects slow growth in potential due to adverse structural forces rather than inadequate aggregate demand.
If we can go back in time to the heady days of 2012, when Professor Mankiw was
going all-out to elect
his client Mitt Romney, we will find
this post, in which Professor Mankiw purports to "[monitor] this so-called recovery" with the following image:
This image, accompanied only by the phrase "monitoring this so-called recovery," seems to be intended to imply that the recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, which had occurred during the presidency of Governor Romney's opponent, Barack Obama, was tepid. A casual reader may also infer from Professor Mankiw's sparse presentation that he intends readers to place the blame for this tepidity at the feet of President Obama. This is Natural and Good, as, after all, Professor Mankiw had a professional interest in Governor Romney's defeat of President Obama.
So, returning now to the first image, and the attendant commentary. Professor Mankiw now believes that "the labor market is almost back to normal," and that, accordingly, "the slow pace of economic growth experienced in recent years reflects slow growth in potential due to adverse structural forces rather than inadequate aggregate demand."
Since Professor Mankiw was good enough to provide a FRED graph to make his 2012 case, we can easily extend that analysis up through the present-day. Doing so gives us the following image, which shows that the trend has largely continued:
Now, if Professor Mankiw's blog posts were not typically so, ahem, brief, his readers may have enjoyed the gift of his analysis as to why the first image shows that "the labor market is almost back to normal," while the second and third images show a recovery that, in Professor Mankiw's view, may not truly even deserve that label.
An alternate possibility is, of course, that both posts are self-contained drive-by hit pieces that do not reflect any pretense of inter-temporal intellectual consistency. Only Professor Mankiw can know for sure...
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