Cheese-eating Job Creators

Not surprising. If older people and college age people are less likely to be working, there will be more jobs for people age 25-54.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/cheese-eating-job-creators/

MAY 21, 2014
Paul Krugman

People are pretty down on European economic performance these days, with good reason. But mainly what we’re looking at is bad macroeconomic policy, the result of premature monetary union plus austerity mania. That’s a very different story from the old version of Eurotrashing, which focused on Eurosclerosis — persistent low employment allegedly caused by excessive welfare states.

Now, people like John Schmitt and Dean Baker began pointing out a long time ago that this story was out of date. If you looked at Europe in general and France in particular, you saw that yes, people retired earlier than in America, and also that fewer young people worked — in part because they didn’t have to work their way through college. But on the eve of the economic crisis employment rates among prime-working-age adults had converged.

Well, I hadn’t looked at this data for a while; and where we are now is quite stunning:



Since the late 1990s we have completely traded places: prime-age French adults are now much more likely than their US counterparts to have jobs.

Strange how amid the incessant bad-mouthing of French performance this fact never gets mentioned.