Impact of Mass Unemployment: 1 in 4 Americans were out of work during the Great Depression
By Jay L. Zagorsky, Senior Lecturer, Questrom School of Business, Boston University The U.S. unemployment rate climbed from a half-century low of 3.5% to 4.4% in March – and is expected to go a lot higher. But the rate, as some predict, surpass the 25% joblessness the U.S. experienced at the peak of the Great Depression. As a macroeconomist who has tracked the labor force for decades, I’ve been wondering about this myself. There are actually two figures the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses to estimate employment levels in the United States. One is the unemployment rate, which comes...
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