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« That's our Rep! | Main | Not sure if it would be a good thing or a bad thing » The New NormalThe Obama administration notoriously predicted an 8% unemployment rate if we did nothing (despite cries from lefty economists that it would be higher). And of course, we now have 9% unemployment with the stimulus. Ezra Klein interviews one of the economists that the Obama administration based their predictions on, and asked why he got it wrong: "In late 2008," he told me, "the economy was falling apart, but no one knew to what degree. We didn't yet know we were losing three-quarters of a million jobs a month. We just didn't have that data yet." So far, you'll recognize his response as fairly standard: Good forecasting requires good data, and good data about the economy was hard to come by in November of 2008. But what Zandi said next chilled me a little, as it's a stark reminder of not only how far we've fallen, but how complacent we've become. By fnord12 | March 2, 2011, 2:59 PM | Liberal Outrage CommentsAlso don't forget that the 9% is mostly because people fell off of the unemployment rolls by becoming "permanently unemployed;" which is to say that they've stopped counting them because it would be too depressing to do so. As Keith Olbermann asked every night before he was taken off the air, "Where are the jobs?" I use the U3 number because that's the apples to apples comparison to the 'around five percent unemployment' figure in the quote. You're looking at U4, which normally tracks a notch above U3 but you're right that there's a higher discrepancy now, maybe half a percentage point more than usual. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Unemployment_measures.svg |