CommentaryInsightsPerspectivesExplainers
Topic
Labor Markets
26 pieces
Pieces
- CommentaryMacroeconomics & Markets
Six productivity readings cannot carry the case being made for artificial intelligence
Output per hour in the nonfarm business sector went from 109.1 in 2020 to 118 in 2025 on a 2017 base of 100, and the largest single step in that window, 3.3 points, landed in 2024 rather than 2025. The two fastest years for the ratio are also the two slowest years for payrolls, which is the shape a shrinking denominator makes as well as the shape a new technology makes.
- PerspectivesInfrastructure
Shovel-ready is a wage question before it is a permitting one
Texas and California employ almost exactly the same number of construction and extraction workers. The median wage in one is 49,170 dollars and in the other 71,670. A national cost per mile that ignores that is not a cost estimate.
- ExplainerRegional Development
How the jobs in an economic impact claim are counted
An announced job number is the output of a model, not a headcount. By the end you will know the three layers such a figure can contain, the difference between a job and a job-year, and what to ask before setting two claims side by side.
- InsightsWorkforce & Skills
The fall in unemployment was finished by 2022, and the rate has risen since
The rate dropped from 8.1 percent in 2020 to 3.7 in 2022, reached a low of 3.6 in 2023, and has risen in both readings since, to 4.3.
- InsightsEconomic Security
American payrolls keep growing, and each year adds less than the one before
Total nonfarm payrolls rose in every annual reading from 2020 to 2025. The size of the rise has fallen three years running, from 6.2 million jobs to 700,000.
- PerspectivesLabor Markets
Healthcare employs more people at higher median pay than production work, which does not mean a transition has held anywhere
Summed across the fifty-one jurisdictions in the 2025 occupational file, healthcare practitioners outnumber production workers by 1,258,080, and in all fifty-one the practitioner median wage is the higher of the two. The jurisdiction most concentrated in that work has the third-lowest median wage of the fifty-one.