Study Suggests Recovery in U.S. Is Relatively Vital

This is one of the most fascinating articles I have read about the economy in some time. As soon as I wrote that I envisioned myself like the guy in the picture in this article (an academic egghead who is probably 50 times smarter than me). But seriously, this looks at our economic recovery and compares and contrasts in with other countries around the world. I have never seen this before and it is very interesting stuff! More importantly, it makes you feel good about what is happening here as compared with everywhere else. We are doing much better and are much further along in our recovery than most. Are you familiar with the term schadenfreude? That is the German term of taking pleasure in other people’s pain or misfortune (taking joy in the suffering of others to be exact). There is an element of that here. They explore what has been working and what has not, all over. Virtually all relevant factors relating to the economy are explored and there is one thing that worries me. It is not talked about a lot but I am afraid this will become a huge problem in the future. They call it “…long-term decline in labor force participation was worrisome.” In my own words, the unemployment numbers are being skewered badly now to reflect positive numbers. But they are doing so by ignoring very important information such as people who are no longer looking for work or who have taken work that can barely sustain them since they cannot find anything else. Bottom line, there are way too many people who need jobs and there are not enough of them to go around. How is this going to tackled going forward? While so many want to forget about this and sweep it under the rug, it is a problem that is getting worse and will not go away. While I wish I had more answers, I think getting the information out to people so they know what is going on is the first step to being able to change it. You can’t change things you don’t know about. Reminds me of one of my client’s favorite quotes “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Now the real question is how can we create some good quality jobs here??

 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/business/economy/study-suggests-recovery-in-us-is-relatively-vital.html?_r=1

Orin Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld Realty Advisors

9858 Glades Rd., Suite 209

Boca Raton, FL 33434 Phone: 561-756-1665

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