Jared Bernstein Quotes on Economics (4 Quotes)

A fundamental principle of our economic system is that the benefits of economic growth will flow to those responsible for their creation. When how fast your income grows depends on your position in the income scale, this principle is violated. In that sense, today's unprecedented gap between the growth of the typical family's income and productivity is our most pressing economic problem.

I wouldn't be surprised if unemployment held constant or dropped a tenth of a percentage point. But will that signal we're heading back to a healthy labor market No, because the economic fundamentals, in terms of growth, just aren't there.

Economists said the data suggested a long-awaited change in the outlook of employers, a movement away from years of reluctance to add new workers. The rate of job creation from 2000 through mid-'04 was just stuck in the cellar, ... and this was an underappreciated, ongoing cause of the jobless recovery.

Yet this peppering of data notwithstanding, economists are not too sanguine about the immediate prospects for income growth on the bottom rungs of the wage scale. The job market is slowly tightening, ... We are wringing out the slack. But we're only six months into a process that could take a year and a half.