Dr. Richard Vedder
Inside Sources quoted Dr. Richard Vedder, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Economics at Ohio University, in a May 4 story finance headlined “Economy Adds 164K New Jobs While Unemployment Dips.”
The job growth rate bounced back somewhat following a lackluster month by reaching 164,000 new jobs in April, detailed a federal report Friday….
“This is an interesting recovery from a labor market perspective,” Ohio University Prof. Richard Vedder told InsideSources. “The standard traditional measures like the unemployment rate, we’re not at an all-time low of course, but we’re very close to it. And we’ve seen an uptick in the labor force participation rate and the unemployment-population ratio, which is a statistic I’ve been looking at more in recent years. But we’re still not where we were in the year 2000.”
The labor force participation rate was already declining when the recession caused it to suddenly drop. It began falling after several years of steady growth in 2000. A large number of retirees could make it difficult to return to that point, but many economists believe there is still plenty of potential for growth.
“So we still have, by the standards of a generation ago, some potential growth in the labor market and it will be interesting to see whether that evolves,” Vedder said. “We do have opportunities for people to earn income who are not working to a greater extent than what was true a generation ago.”
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