Quote

The unemployment rate is not real.

But we can also take the radical view that the test of an economy has to do with the extent to which it is providing everybody with a decent means of living.

Well, our economy is very strong and growing. We have created 5.4 million new jobs in the last 3 years. Our unemployment rate is better than the average unemployment rate of the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s.

In addition to joblessness, of course, by the working of supply and demand, when you have a larger number of people unemployed, wages do not rise at the normal level, so that we had last year a drop in real wages.

An actual understanding of our economy is that our economy most depends on our rate of innovation... It's not actually understood by most of the people running for office, but it's not in fact disputed.

Moreover, statistics can be deceiving: the growth of jobs in the US in the 90s was due to many part-time jobs, with no benefits and generally low pay.

You do not have to be an economist to know that putting up the cost of employing someone is a pretty barking thing to do when you're trying to get out of a recession.

Unemployment determination in a modern economy was the main subject area of my research from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1970s and again from the mid-1980s to the early 1990s.

If you have a private firm and you spend a ton of money to pay employees, but what you produce is a flop, there will be no value to GDP. But government spending all gets counted as contributing to economic growth. That's why in the early days of creating these measurements, some people didn't want to count government spending.

When you poll all of the economists, uh, across America that I think are intellectually honest they would all, or maybe not all, but 95% of them 96% of them would say you know we really have got a powerful economy.