Last year there was a flurry of interest in the apparent fact that there were many more job vacancies than one should have expected given the high level of unemployment — a shift in the so-called Beveridge curve. And this was seized on by a number of people as evidence that much of our current unemployment is structural, that we need to accept a “new normal” of high unemployment rates. See Mike Konczal on this eagerness.
Well, Mike is back with a new bulletin. We now know what that shifted Beveridge curve was about: bad data.
The BLS numbers on job openings aren’t raw data, they’re based in part on imputations about new business formation. The imputations have been updated with new information — and guess what, much of the apparent anomaly has disappeared.
No, it’s not structural. And we’ll only face a “new normal” of high unemployment if policy makers want it that way.