Submitted by CARPE DIEM

Paul Krugman in today’s NY Times: The official unemployment rate of 5.1%, though rising, is still fairly low by historical standards. Yet economic attitudes are worse now than they were in 1992, when the average unemployment rate was 7.5%. Why are we feeling so down?

Our bleakness partly reflects the fact that most Americans are doing considerably worse than the usual economic measures let on. The official unemployment rate may be relatively low — but the percentage of prime-working-age Americans without jobs, which isn’t the same thing, is historically high.

Don Boudreaux responds: Krugman is simply wrong to assert that the percentage of Americans of prime-working-age without jobs is “historically high” — and misleading to suggest that, whatever this percentage might be today, that it is evidence of some major economy malady.

Comment: The labor-force participation rate for prime-working-age Americans has been relatively flat at about 83% for the last 20 years (see chart above, data available here), and is actually slightly higher so far this year at 83.10% (average from Jan-March 2008) than in any full year since 2002 (83.3%).

Don is correct - what is Krugman talking about? The percentage of prime-working-age Americans without jobs is close to an historical low, not an historical high!

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