Jason Furman: belief

Transcript context

…But the losers turned out to be bigger losers than we had thought, right? Opioid deaths were not predicted, say, at their current magnitude. I think the China shock literature is a fantastic contribution to labor economics and is less important in thinking about trade. We’ve learned about weaknesses and deficiencies in the structure of our labor markets — the ability to connect people with jobs, the ability of people to move after a shock happens, to get themselves retrained, to have some form of insurance that could help them in the event that their next job has a lower pay. So yes, that literature, together with other observations about what’s been going on with, for example, prime-age men in the workforce, has affected the way I think about the dynamism and efficient allocation of labor in the American workforce, much more than it’s affected the way I think about trade. Why did labor markets recover so slowly from the 2008 crash? You would think, “Well, it’s the world of the internet. Everyone has all this information. Matching markets are better.” But the labor market recovers quite slowly. Why?…

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