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By Josh Bvens and Heidi Shierholz This morning’s release of the June 2012 employment situation report by the Bureau of Labor Statistics marked three years since the official start of the recovery from the Great Recession in June 2009.  That makes this a useful moment to assess how this recovery stacks up against earlier ones, ...

Our brains aren’t the only organ that influences our mental reactions and processes. Our hearts matter, too. Over more than two decades, to the surprise of many psychologists, Stephen Porges, a psychiatry professor and neuroscientist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has repeatedly shown that heart rate variability — having a wide range of ...

Amid our vacations, fireworks and barbecues Wednesday, it’s easy to forget that we are actually commemorating the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The most famous phrase from that document is one of our nation’s founding values: “All men are created equal.” As it happens, this July Fourth week brings two significant victories for that ...

Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman and Richard Layard, a distinguished British economist, took the lead last week in drafting a sign on “Manifesto for Economic Common Sense” condemning the turn toward austerity in many countries. This manifesto seems destined to garner tens or even hundreds of thousands of signatures, including mine. While the basic logic of ...

Earlier this week I noted, tongue-firmly-in-cheek, that we’re all MMTers now, following Paul McCulley’s recommendation that we just declare victory. And be nice about it. Well here is a strange post from Brad DeLong: He proclaims that essentially anyone who is anyone is a Minskian. And apparently always was. That is why mainstream economists like “Paul Krugman, ...

The private sector of the U.S. economy has added jobs for the past 27 months in a row, corporate profits have hit an all-time high, and the U.S. auto industry is back, with manufacturers consistently adding jobs for the longest period since the mid-1990s. Still, as President Barack Obama has said, “we are still not creating ...

In 2011, the nationwide African American unemployment rate stood at 15.9 percent—and in several of the country’s large metropolitan areas, the black unemployment rate was significantly higher. This issue brief examines African American unemployment rates of the 19 metropolitan areas for which we could derive reliable estimates. The key findings of this brief are: In 2011, ...

  I have been asked by attorneys for petitioners in this case to offer an opinion as to whether photo identification requirements such as those mandated by Pennsylvania’s Act 18 of 2012 (the Photo ID Law), are justified by evidence of voter impersonation forms of election fraud; and to explain what voter fraud is; discuss ...

If Europe continues its steady march to financial depression and collapse of the Euro, no politician will be more to blame than German Chancellor Angela Merkel. Last week, Merkel repeated the same pattern that has characterized her behavior since the sovereign debt crisis began — resisting sensible reforms until the costs of delay became overwhelming, ...

Our society is obsessed with productivity and efficiency, and we despise procrastination. The early Americans imported the Earl of Chesterfield’s admonition: “No idleness, no laziness, no procrastination: never put off till tomorrow what you can do today.” They read Jonathan Edwards’s sermon “Procrastination, or The Sin and Folly of Depending on Future Time.” They built ...