Guy Berger

YouTube video by Thelonious Monk Unidentified Solo Piano by Thelonious Monk from 'Thelonious In Action'

Monk in Dreamland youtu.be/TyJe1aJ9_fk?...

Connecting job seekers online with “buddies” who already managed to find a new job significantly increases their employment probability and their earnings, from de Koning, Muller, Belot, Engels, Fouarge, Keer, Kircher, and Phlippen www.nber.org/papers/w34912

Humanity’s greatest vocation is safe from automation

The dogs are barking, the finches are singing, it’s a warm (soon to be hot) morning… a wonderful day for 8 yr old softball

What… people exist outside of social media?

(Seriously… I had no idea)

He’s not active on here so you’ll have to go to the other site, but if you want to understand what is going on with Iran I strongly recommend following @gbrew24.bsky.social

In case you want to relive (hate watch?) this morning's ugly jobs report over the weekend, Jonathan, Andrea and I got to experience it as it happened!

Wait why aren’t you using the vibecoded competitor - don’t you know they conquered the most

The one thing driving U.S. job growth The U.S. added some 130,000 jobs in January. Almost all of those jobs were in just one sector: Health care. Why aren’t jobs growing anywhere else?

Thanks to Meghna Chakrabarti and Claire Donnelly for having me on to chat about health care employment on their @wbur.org show On Point! We could have gone on a lot longer. You can listen here:

www.wbur.org/onpoint/2026...

Things you shouldn’t do:

Cite declining labor force participation as bad news for the labor market without acknowledging our aging population

Unless you think we should force America’s retirees back to work

There are aspects of the US labor market that have worsened since 2022-23 but this isn’t one of them

Our population is aging, and that means retirees are a growing share of the labor force. So I would expect labor force participation to decline over time and it’s not “bad news”.

Labor force participation for prime working age Americans is near a quarter-century high

bsky.app/profile/econ...

About a month and a half ago (before the Jan jobs report) I put down some scenarios for the unemployment rate and probabilities attached to them.

We're currently somewhere between my median and 25th %tile outcomes, i.e. very slightly worse than my baseline

My recap of today's jobs report. Don't overreact to the February data...

Instead, you should worry about what spiking oil prices will do to future data.

Link: macromostly.substack.com/p/bls-jobs-r...

Any ideas for a prompt injection?!????

AGI not here yet

YouTube video by BBC Comedy Greats Don't Mention the War! (HD & EXTENDED) | Fawlty Towers | BBC Comedy Greats

Every time I see the phrase “policy uncertainty” these days youtu.be/RyPj21jBl_0?...

The AI. All I did was describe “doomer” in this context and ask for a horror movie poster for “Dawn of the Doomer”

February’s jobs data was ice cold.

I also think it’s a risky habit to hang big overarching labor market narratives on individual jobs reports, they aren’t load bearing

Don’t trust labor market takes that discount either January’s jobs report or February’s jobs report

Imho “what will happen to the labor market if health care weakens” gets the causality chain backwards

8/ Hispanic and African-American unemployment rates rose in February. In the case of African Americans, it's much higher than a year ago.

7/ Defying continuing claims, the unemployment rate due to permanent layoff is refusing to decline (indeed, it's rising veeeery slowly).

6/ Another snippet of good news... marginally attached and discouraged worker prevalence fell in February.

5/ Unemployment rates for young people rose - more so for people in their late teens than for people in their early 20s.

(For people in their early 20s unemployment rates are lower than they were a year ago... probably noise in small CPS subgroups.)

4/ Not everything in the report was bad. Part-time-for-economic-reasons, which people were freaking out about 2-3 months ago, is now the lowest it's been since mid-2024.

(My bet is this will keep creeping up slowly as the labor market cools, noise aside.)

3/ Prime working age employment has been ~flat over the past year, but prime working age participation has been booming... even after a slight dip in February, still higher than it was a year ago, and close to its cyclical high.

2/ Prime working age employment population ticks down to 80.7%. Has been fairly flat over the past ~16 months, as people with jobs have been relatively insulated in this low hiring, low firing environment.