Mindblown: a blog about philosophy.
-
Patterns of Unemployment
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Let’s look at how unemployment rates have changed over time and how various groups of people are affected by unemployment differently. The Historical U.S. Unemployment Rate Figure 8.3 shows the historical pattern of U.S. unemployment since 1955. Figure 8.3 The U.S. Unemployment Rate, 1948–2020 The U.S.…
-
How Economists Define and Compute Unemployment Rate
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Newspaper or television reports typically describe unemployment as a percentage or a rate. A recent report might have said, for example, from September 2021 to October 2021, the U.S. unemployment rate declined from 4.8% to 4.6%. At a glance, the changes between the…
-
Introduction to Unemployment
Figure 8.1 Replaced by Robots Robots are replacing the jobs historically done by workers in a bread factory. (Credit: modification of “Factory Automation Robotics Palettizing Bread” by KUKA Roboter GmbH/Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain) Chapter Objectives In this chapter, you will learn about: Bring It Home Unemployment and the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Complicated Story It was the most abrupt…
-
Summary
7.1 The Relatively Recent Arrival of Economic Growth Since the early nineteenth century, there has been a spectacular process of long-run economic growth during which the world’s leading economies—mostly those in Western Europe and North America—expanded GDP per capita at an average rate of about 2% per year. In the last half-century, countries like Japan, South…
-
Economic Convergence
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Some low-income and middle-income economies around the world have shown a pattern of convergence, in which their economies grow faster than those of high-income countries. GDP increased by an average rate of 2.7% per year in the 1990s and 1.7% per year from…
-
Components of Economic Growth
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Over decades and generations, seemingly small differences of a few percentage points in the annual rate of economic growth make an enormous difference in GDP per capita. In this module, we discuss some of the components of economic growth, including physical capital,…
-
Labor Productivity and Economic Growth
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Sustained long-term economic growth comes from increases in worker productivity, which essentially means how well we do things. In other words, how efficient is your nation with its time and workers? Labor productivity is the value that each employed person creates per unit of…
-
The Relatively Recent Arrival of Economic Growth
Learning Objectives By the end of this section, you will be able to: Let’s begin with a brief overview of spectacular economic growth patterns around the world in the last two centuries. We commonly refer to this as the period of modern economic growth. (Later in the chapter we will discuss lower economic growth rates and…
-
Economic Growth
Figure 7.1 Average Daily Calorie Consumption Not only has the number of calories that people consume per day increased, so has the amount of food calories that people are able to afford based on their working wages. (Credit: modification of “Daily Calorie Intake” by Lauren Manning/Flickr Creative Commons, CC BY 2.0) Chapter Objectives In this chapter, you will…
-
Summary
6.1 Measuring the Size of the Economy: Gross Domestic Product Economists generally express the size of a nation’s economy as its gross domestic product (GDP), which measures the value of the output of all final goods and services produced within the country in a year. Economists measure GDP by taking the quantities of all goods and…
Got any book recommendations?