Since September of 2014, Jordan has joined other Western and Arab coalition partners in striking Islamic State (IS) positions in Syria, with the country’s King Abdullah framing the war against IS as a “third world war.” How have conflicts on Jordan’s borders and now the country’s direct intervention strained the country’s resources? How have the country’s leaders presented their participation at home and abroad?

In a timely Policy Briefing based on field research, Sultan Barakat and Andrew Leber assess Jordan’s vulnerabilities to regional conflicts and domestic pressures. Despite broad public support for action against IS, they note a growing gap between state and society only exacerbated by adverse events such as the capture and uncertain fate of a downed Jordanian pilot.

Read "Fortress Jordan: Putting the Money to Work"

Ultimately, Barakat and Leber note Jordan’s strategic importance to its allies but caution against it playing a front-line combat role. The authors contend that reducing threats to Jordanian stability lies not in “taking the fight to IS” abroad, but in strengthening Jordanian society at home.

While calling for improved governance in the Kingdom, the authors note reluctance on the part of Jordan’s ruling elites and their allies to promote full-scale political reforms. Barakat and Leber contend that they should therefore channel their fears about regional instability and extremism into productive action on Jordan’s economy. This will entail restructuring aid flows to the country toward productive investment, selectively incorporating Syrian refugees into the workforce, and putting forward a credible vision for the country’s economic future.

Downloads

• English PDF
• Arabic PDF

      

The Muslim Brotherhood has faced a great deal of opposition in the Middle East in recent years, with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all declaring it to be a terrorist organization. Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood, which has historically operated as a loyal opposition to the palace, has also come under fire as regional instability has dampened Jordanians’ appetite for protest and reform. While the group still enjoys significant public support, it is facing a number of internal tensions, culminating in its recent split. How can the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood retain its political clout? Can it play a role in stabilizing and strengthening Jordan?

Read The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan: Time to reform

In this new Policy Briefing, Neven Bondokji discusses the various reform efforts undertaken by Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood since 2010, and argues that it urgently needs to see them through. She identifies key challenges, including the division over the Zamzam reform initiative, overlap between the movement and its affiliated political party, the inclusion of women, the ongoing ideological shifts in the movement’s political discourse, and generational tensions. Additionally, Bondokji examines how Jordan’s East Banker-Palestinian fault line is manifested within the Brotherhood.

Bondokji makes a series of recommendations, including that the Muslim Brotherhood ensure the independence of its political party’s leadership and decision-making, actively engage in and disseminate discourse on plural politics and policy debates, and introduce new leaders and styles of communication. She also asserts that Jordan’s government must empower political parties and allow for a more representative parliament. The application of such reforms, Bondokji concludes, would allow Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood to be an asset in the country’s efforts against destabilizing extremism.

Downloads

• English Paper
• Arabic Paper

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

Volunteer, civil society and governmental delegates from 22 nations gathered in Johannesburg this month for the Southern Africa Conference on Volunteer Action for Development. The conference was co-convened by United Nations Volunteers (UNV) and Volunteer and Service Enquiry Southern Africa (VOSESA), in observance of the 10th anniversary of the United Nations International Year of Volunteers (IYV).

Naheed Haque, deputy executive coordinator for United Nations Volunteers, gave tribute to the late Nobel Laureate Wangari Mathai and her Greenbelt tree planting campaign as the “quintessential volunteer movement.” Haque called for a “new development paradigm that puts voluntarism at the center of community-centered sustainable development.” In this paradigm, human happiness and service to others would be key considerations, in addition to economic indicators and development outcomes including health and climate change.  

The international gathering developed strategies to advance three key priorities for the 15 nations in the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC): combating HIV/ AIDS; engaging the social and economic participation of youth; and promoting regional integration and peace. Research data prepared by Civicus provided information on the rise of voluntary service in Africa, as conferees assessed strategies to advance “five pillars” of effective volunteerism: engaging youth, community involvement, international volunteers, corporate leadership and higher education in service.

VOSESA executive director, Helene Perold, noted that despite centuries of migration across the region, the vision for contemporary regional cooperation between southern African countries has largely been in the minds of heads of states with “little currency at the grassroots level.” Furthermore, it has been driven by the imperative of economic integration with a specific focus on trade. Slow progress has now produced critiques within the region that the strategy for integrating southern African countries cannot succeed on the basis of economic cooperation alone. Perold indicated that collective efforts by a wide range of civic, academic, and governmental actors at the Johannesburg conference could inject the importance of social participation within and between countries as a critical component in fostering regional integration and achieving development outcomes. 

This premise of voluntary action’s unique contribution to regional integration was underscored by Emiliana Tembo, director of Gender and Social Affairs for the Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA). Along with measures promoting free movement of labor and capital to step up trade investment, Tembo stressed the importance of “our interconnectedness as people,” citing Bishop Desmond Tutu’s maxim toward the virtues of “Ubuntu – a person who is open and available to others.”

The 19 nation COMESA block is advancing an African free-trade zone movement from the Cape of South Africa, to Cairo Egypt. The “tripartite” regional groupings of SADC, COMESA and the East Africa Community are at the forefront of this pan-African movement expanding trade and development.

Preliminary research shared at the conference by VOSESA researcher Jacob Mwathi Mati noted the effects of cross border youth volunteer exchange programs in southern and eastern Africa. The research indicates positive outcomes including knowledge, learning and “friendship across borders,” engendered by youth exchange service programs in South Africa, Mozambique, Tanzania and Kenya that were sponsored Canada World Youth and South Africa Trust.   

On the final day of the Johannesburg conference, South Africa service initiatives were assessed in field visits by conferees including loveLife, South Africa’s largest HIV prevention campaign. loveLife utilizes youth volunteer service corps reaching up to 500,000 at risk youths in monthly leadership and peer education programs. “Youth service in South Africa is a channel for the energy of youth, (building) social capital and enabling public innovation,” Programme Director Scott Burnett stated. “Over the years our (service) participants have used their small stipends to climb the social ladder through education and micro-enterprise development.”

Nelly Corbel, senior program coordinator of the John D. Gerhart Center for Philanthropy and Civic Engagement at the American University in Cairo, noted that the Egyptian Arab Spring was “the only movement that cleaned-up after the revolution." On February 11^th, the day after the resignation of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, thousands of Egyptian activists  removed debris from Tahrir Square and engaged in a host of other volunteer clean-up and painting projects. In Corbel's words: “Our entire country is like a big flag now,” from the massive display of national voluntarism in clean-up projects, emblematic of the proliferation of youth social innovation aimed at rebuilding a viable civil society.

At the concluding call-to-action session, Johannesburg conferees unanimously adopted a resolution, which was nominated by participating youth leaders from southern Africa states. The declaration, “Creating an Enabling Environment for Volunteer Action in the Region” notes that “volunteering is universal, inclusive and embraces free will, solidarity, dignity and trust… [creating] a powerful basis for unity, common humanity, peace and development.”  The resolution, contains a number of action-oriented recommendations advancing voluntarism as a “powerful means for transformational change and societal development.” Policy recommendations will be advanced by South African nations and other stakeholders at the forthcoming Rio + 20 deliberations and at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly on December 5, the 10^th anniversary of the International Year of the Volunteer.

      

       

Justin Wolfers, professor of Economics and Public Policy at the University of Michigan, re-joins Brookings, Vice President and Economic Studies Co-Director Karen Dynan announced today.  Wolfers was a visiting fellow from 2010-2011.

A world-renowned empirical economist, Wolfers will continue in his role as co-editor, along with David Romer of the University of California, of the Brookings Papers on Economic Activity (BPEA), the flagship economic journal of the Institution.  He will continue his focus on labor economics, macroeconomics, political economy, economics of the family, social policy, law and economics, public economics, and behavioral economics. His appointment as senior fellow will last 13 months.

Wolfers is also a research associate with the National Bureau for Economic Research, a research affiliate of the Centre for Economic Policy Research in London, a research fellow of the German Institute for the Study of Labor, and a senior scientist for Gallup, among other affiliations. He is a contributor for Bloomberg View, NPR Marketplace, and the Freakonomics website and was named one of the 13 top young economists to watch by the New York Times.  Wolfers did his undergraduate work at the University of Sydney, Australia and received his Master’s and Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University.  He is a dual Australian-U.S. national and was once an apprentice to a bookie which led to his interest in prediction markets. 

“We are pleased to re-welcome Justin back to Economic Studies,” said Dynan. “His work continues to challenge the conventional wisdom, and we look forward to collaborating with him once again.” 

“Justin is outstanding at communicating economic ideas to a wide audience, as evidenced by his regular writings for media as well as his large social media presence,” added Ted Gayer, co-director of Economic Studies.

“I have enormous affection for the Brookings Institution, which provides not only a home for deep scholarly research, but also an unmatched platform for engaging the policy debate,” said Wolfers.  “The Economic Studies program has a rich history of being the go-to place for policymakers, and I look forward to coming back and engaging in debate with my colleagues there.”

       

The headlines seem pretty good. Unemployment fell a tick to 7.3 percent. And jobs growth continued, with payrolls expanding by 169,000 in August, which is just shy of the 175,000 new jobs that analysts were expecting.

But beneath the headline: blech!

The most important news was the revisions to what we had previously thought was a healthy and perhaps self-sustaining recovery. Instead, jobs growth in July was revised from 162,000, to a weak 104,000, and June was also revised downward. Taken together, this month's revisions means we've created 74,000 fewer jobs than previously believed. And the previous jobs report subtracted another 26,000 jobs through revisions. Moreover, for reasons that remain a mystery, revisions have tended to be pro-cyclical, meaning that the healthy recovery we thought we were having might have been expected to yield further upward revisions. All this means that analysts are hastily revising their views.

The other bad news comes from the household survey, where employment fell 115,000, leading the employment-to-population ratio to decline by 0.1 percentage points. So the decline in the unemployment rate isn't due to folks getting jobs; instead, it's due to people dropping out of the labor force.

I have two simple metrics I use to measure the "underlying" pace of jobs growth. The first puts 80% weight on the (more accurate) payrolls survey, and 20% weight on the noisier household survey. That measure suggests employment grew by only 112,000 in August. The alternative is to focus on the 3-month average of payrolls growth, which suggests we're creating slightly around 148,000 jobs per month.

Bottom line: This report says that we're barely creating enough jobs to keep the unemployment rate falling from its current high levels. Policymakers have been looking for a signal that the recovery has become self-sustaining. This report doesn't provide it. And until we're confident that the recovery will keep rolling on, we should delay either any monetary tightening, further fiscal cuts, and definitely postpone the legislative shenanigans that Congress is threatening.

       

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This event has been postponed, and will be rescheduled for a later date.

With ongoing crises in Ukraine, Syria, and other regions of the world, U.S. global leadership is arguably as critical now as it has ever been. However, many question how the United States should exercise its leadership, what foreign policy agenda it should pursue, and how it should configure its military and security agencies going forward. In a recent speech at West Point, President Obama laid out his foreign policy agenda for the remainder of his presidency. While the Obama Administration will pursue the president’s agenda as laid out at West Point, others in Washington have different views on how best to manage U.S. foreign policy going forward.

On June 11, the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings will host Senator John McCain (R-AZ), former presidential candidate and member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, for an address on the future of U.S. foreign and security policy. The address will be introduced by Brookings Senior Fellow and Director of Research for Foreign Policy Michael O’Hanlon, and the discussion following the Senator’s address will be moderated by Senior Fellow Robert Kagan.

After the program, Senator McCain will take audience questions.

Join the conversation on Twitter using #McCain

      

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John Quincy Adams famously said that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” A diplomat, secretary of state, as well as the sixth president, Adams is often described as a “realist,” and as the founder of American foreign policy realism. But did his own policy choices square with that doctrine of restraint? Recently, President Obama has described his own views in explicitly realist terms; Hillary Clinton is widely viewed as a more ardent believer in the active use of American power; and the Republican candidates seem more eager to build walls than to engage the outside world.

On April 11, the Brookings Project on International Order and Strategy (IOS) hosted a discussion between Brookings Senior Fellow Robert Kagan and James Traub, columnist and contributor at foreignpolicy.com, lecturer of foreign policy at New York University, and now the author of the new book, “John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit” (Basic Books, 2016). Kagan and Traub debated whether Adams was a foreign policy realist and whether his approach to foreign policy can still inform the policy choices facing the United States today. Brookings Fellow Thomas Wright, director of IOS, moderated the discussion.

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• Was John Quincy Adams a realist? A debate

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• Transcript (.pdf)

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• 20160411_john_quincy_adams_transcript

       

November's U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) employment report showed continued improvement in the job market, with employers adding 211,000 workers to their payrolls and hourly pay edging up compared with its level a year ago. The pace of job growth was similar to that over the past year and somewhat slower than the pace in 2014. For the 69^th consecutive month, private-sector payrolls increased. Since the economic recovery began in the third quarter of 2009, all the nation’s employment gains have occurred as a result of expansion in private-sector payrolls. Government employment has shrunk by more than half a million workers, or about 2.5 percent. In the past twelve months, however, public payrolls edged up by 93,000.

The good news on employment gains in November was sweetened by revised estimates of job gains in the previous two months. Revisions added 8,000 to estimated job growth in September and 27,000 to job gains in October. The BLS now estimates that payrolls increased 298,000 in October, a big rebound compared with the more modest gains in August and September, when payrolls grew an average of about 150,000 a month.

Average hourly pay in November was 2.3 percent higher than its level 12 months earlier. This is a slightly faster rate of improvement compared with the gains we saw between 2010 and 2014. A tighter job market may mean that employers are now facing modestly higher pressure to boost employee compensation. The exceptionally low level of consumer price inflation means that the slow rate of nominal wage growth translates into a healthy rate of real wage improvement. The latest BLS numbers show that real weekly and hourly earnings in October were 2.4 percent above their levels one year earlier. Not only have employers added more than 2.6 million workers to their payrolls over the past year, the purchasing power of workers' earnings have been boosted by the slightly faster pace of wage gain and falling prices for oil and other commodities.

The BLS household survey also shows robust job gains last month. Employment rose 244,000 in November, following a jump of 320,000 in October. More than 270,000 adults entered the labor force in November, so the number of unemployed increased slightly, leaving the unemployment rate unchanged at 5.0 percent. In view of the low level of the jobless rate, the median duration of unemployment spells remains surprisingly long, 10.8 weeks. Between 1967 and the onset of the Great Recession, the median duration of unemployment was 10.8 weeks or higher in just seven months. Since the middle of the Great Recession, the median duration of unemployment has been 10.8 weeks or longer for 82 consecutive months. The reason, of course, is that many of the unemployed have been looking for work for a long time. More than one-quarter of the unemployed—slightly more than two million job seekers—have been jobless for at least 6 months.  That number has been dropping for more than five years, but remains high relative to our experience before the Great Recession.

If there is bad news in the latest employment report, it's the sluggish response of labor force participation to a brighter job picture. The participation rate of Americans 16 and older edged up 0.1 point in November but still remains 3.5 percentage points below its level before the Great Recession. About half the decline can be explained by an aging adult population, but a sizeable part of the decline remains unexplained. The participation rate of men and women between 25 and 54 years old is now 80.8 percent, exactly the same level it was a year ago but 2.2 points lower than it was before the Great Recession. Despite the fact that real wages are higher and job finding is now easier than was the case earlier in the recovery, the prime-age labor force participation rate remains stuck well below its level before the recession. How strong must the recovery be before prime-age adults are induced to come back into the work force? Even though the recovery is now 6 and a half years old, we still do not know.

      

Employers continued to boost payrolls in 2015, capping six straight years of job gains. It was the third year in a row in which employment gains topped 210,000 a month. In the 12 months ending in November, public and private payrolls increased 220,000 a month, or about 1.9 percent over the year. Virtually all the growth in payrolls was in the private sector, which added 212,000 jobs a month. The public sector added modestly to its payrolls last year, but the number of government employees remains more than one million (4.4 percent) below the peak level attained in 2010. 

Nearly all major industries except mining contributed to job gains in the past 12 months, though gains in manufacturing were weaker than in any year since the expansion began in 2010.  Payrolls in the mining industry tumbled more than 10 percent, hurt by a steep fall in oil and gas prices and the decline in exploration for new energy reserves. The construction industry continued to add to payrolls last year at about the same pace as in the previous two years, although the level of employment is still about 1.2 million (15 percent) below the peak level achieved in 2006.

Based on the age composition of the U.S. population, between 65,000-80,000 new jobs are needed every month to keep the unemployment rate from rising. Since late 2010, monthly payroll gains have comfortably exceeded this threshold. As a result, the jobless rate has declined steadily. In the 12 months through November 2015, the unemployment rate dropped another 0.8 percentage point, falling to 5.0 percent. The jobless rate is now within a half percentage point of its level immediately before the Great Recession. Since reaching a peak in the autumn of 2009, the unemployment rate has been cut in half.

We’ve also seen improvement in other indicators of job market distress in the past year. The number of Americans who want full-time jobs but have been forced to take part-time positions fell more than 11 percent in the 12 months through November 2015. About 9 million workers who wanted a full-time job were employed part-time in the middle of 2010. That number has fallen to about 6 million in recent months.  Similarly, the number of Americans in long spells of unemployment continues to shrink. Workers reporting they were unemployed 6 months or longer fell to 2.05 million in November, representing a considerable improvement since 2010. In that year, more than 6 million jobless workers reported they had been looking for work for at least a half a year.

The most welcome news for Americans who hold jobs is that inflation-adjusted wage levels improved last year.  Real average hourly earnings increased 1.8 percent between November 2014 and November 2015, and real weekly earnings climbed 1.6 percent.  These gains represent a considerable improvement compared with earlier years in the recovery, when real wage gains were negligible.  Nonetheless, nominal wage gains in 2015 were only slightly faster than they were in earlier years of the recovery. The reason for the startling turnaround in real wage growth is that consumer prices increased very little over the past year.  In the 12 months ending in November, the CPI edged up just 0.5 percent, almost a full percentage point more slowly than the average rate of consumer inflation in the previous three years.  The slowdown was driven by lower prices for energy and other key commodities.  (The “core” consumer inflation rate, which strips out the effects of price changes in energy and food, was 2.0 percent last year, a bit higher than the rate in the previous year.) 

Back when politicians and voters cared more about inflation than they currently do, Brookings economist Arthur Okun proposed an economic indicator called the “misery index” to summarize the dual hardships of inflation and unemployment. To measure economic misery Okun suggested adding the current unemployment rate and a measure of consumer price inflation.  In Chart 1 below I have added the civilian unemployment rate and the trailing 12-month percentage change in the CPI.  In the 11 months of 2012 through November, the misery index averaged just 5.4, its lowest level since the 1950s and well below its average levels in the 1990s (8.8) and in the period from 2000 to 2007 (7.8). When inflation is benign and has remained subdued for a long time, Americans may forget the pain they feel when price increases are frequent and large. Okun’s misery index fell to an exceptionally low level in 2015, even if a small majority of Americans continues to believe the economy is getting worse.

The good news in 2015 is that unemployment continued to fall and real wages began to rise.  The less welcome news is that key measures of labor force participation failed to improve.  For example, the labor force participation rate of Americans between 25 and 54 was the same in November 2015 as it was in November 2014. More worryingly, it was 2.1 percentage points below its level in November 2007, just before the Great Recession.  So far we have seen no rebound in participation among people in prime working ages, despite abundant signs that it’s easier to land a job. 

Low participation is the main explanation for depressed employment rates among prime-age Americans.  Participation rates are not only low in comparison to levels seen before the Great Recession, they are also now below those in other rich countries.  Charts 2 and 3 compare employment-to-population rates among 25-54 year-olds in seven OECD member countries (Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, the United Kingdom, and the United States).  The charts show employment rates separately for men and women in two different years, 2000 and 2014.  The countries are ranked, from left to right, by their employment rates in 2014. In 2000 the U.S. had the second highest male employment rate (Chart 2) and the second highest female employment rate (Chart 3) of the seven countries listed.  By 2014, the U.S. had the lowest male and female employment rates among the countries compared.  Although several nations saw declines in their prime-age male employment rate, only the U.S. also experienced a decline in its prime-age female employment rate.  The other six countries all saw increases in female employment.

The main reason for the drop in prime-age U.S. employment was the decline in prime-age participation. An enduring puzzle of the current recovery is the failure of participation rates to rebound, even in the face of steady improvement in the job market.

      

The latest BLS employment report showed remarkable strength in the U.S. job market even as global financial markets were trembling. Employers added 292,000 to their payrolls in December. Upward revisions in previous BLS estimates also boosted gains in October and November. In the last quarter of 2015, payrolls increased at a rate of 284,000 per month, a remarkable performance in the face of rising uncertainty about prospects for the world economy. U.S. employers added a total of 2.65 million jobs in 2015, the second best calendar-year gain of the current recovery. (Gains were stronger in 2014 but smaller in earlier years of the recovery.)

As usual, private employers accounted for an overwhelming share of the job gains. Ninety-seven percent of the gains in the fourth quarter and 96 percent of the gains last year occurred as a result of employment gains in the private sector. Whatever the uncertainty of the world economic outlook, U.S. employers have enough confidence in their own prospects to keep adding to their payrolls at a healthy clip. Public employment remains about 375,000 (1.7 percent) lower than it was at the onset of the Great Depression. Though government payrolls are now growing, in percentage terms they have been rising much more slowly that private payrolls.

      

I came across an interesting chart in yesterday’s Morning Money tipsheet from Politico that struck me as a something that sounded intuitively correct but was, in fact, not. It's worth a comment on this blog, which has served as a forum for discussion of jobs numbers throughout the recovery.

Between last week’s BLS employment report and last night’s State of the Union, we’ve heard a lot about impressive job growth in 2015. For my part, I wrote on this blog last week that the 2.6 million jobs created last year makes 2015 the second best calendar-year for job gains of the current recovery.

The tipsheet’s "Chart of the Day," however, suggested that job growth in 2015 was actually lower-than-average if we adjust for the change in the size of the labor force. This is what was in the tipsheet from Politico:

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CHART OF THE DAY: NOMINAL JOB GROWTH — Via Hamilton Place Strategies: "Adjusting jobs data to account for labor force shifts can help shed some light on voters' economic angst, even as we see good headline statistics. … Though 2015 was a good year in terms of job growth during the current recovery and had higher-than-average job growth as compared to recent recoveries, 2015 actually had lower-than-average job growth if we adjust for the change in the size of the labor force." http://bit.ly/1OnBXSm

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I decided to look at the numbers.

The authors propose that we should "scale" reported job gains by the number of workers, which at first seems to make sense. Surely, an increase in monthly employment of 210,000 cannot mean the same thing when there are already 150 million employed people as when there are just 75 million employed people.

But this intuition is subtly wrong for a simple reason: The age structure of the population may also differ in the two situations I have just described. Suppose when there are 75 million employed people, the population of 20-to-64 year-old people is growing 300,000 every month. Suppose also when there are 150 million employed people, the population of 20-to-64 year-olds is shrinking 100,000 per month. 

Most informed observers would say that job growth of 210,000 a month is much more impressive under the latter assumptions than it is under the first set of assumptions, even though under the latter assumptions the number of employed people is twice as high as it is under the first assumptions.

BLS estimates show that in the seven years from December 2008-December 2015, the average monthly growth in the 16-to-64 year-old (noninstitutionalized) U.S. population was 85,200 per month. That is the lowest average growth rate of the working-age population going back to at least 1960. Here are the numbers:

Once we scale the monthly employment gain by the growth in the working-age population, the growth of jobs in recent years has been more impressive—not less—than suggested by the raw monthly totals. Gains in employer payrolls have far surpassed the growth in the number of working-age Americans over the past five years.

Headline writers have been impressed by recent job gains because the job gains have been impressive.

      

The pace of employment gains slowed in January from the torrid pace of the previous three months. The latest BLS jobs report shows that employers added 151,000 to their payrolls in January, well below monthly gains in October through December. In that quarter payrolls climbed almost 280,000 a month. For two reasons, the deceleration in employment gains was not a complete surprise. First, the rapid growth payrolls in the last quarter did not seem consistent with other indicators of growth in the quarter. Preliminary GDP estimates suggest that output growth slowed sharply in the fourth quarter compared with the previous two. Second, I see few indicators suggesting the pace of economic growth has picked up so far this year.

It’s worth noting that employment gains in January were far faster than needed to keep the unemployment rate from increasing. In fact, if payrolls continue to grow at January’s pace throughout the year, we should expect the unemployment rate to continue falling. As usual in the current expansion, private employers accounted for all of January’s employment gains. Government payrolls shrank slightly. The number of public employees is about the same as it was last July. Over the same period, private employers added about 213,000 workers a month to their payrolls. In January employment gains slowed in construction and in business and professional industries. Payrolls shrank in mining. Since mining payrolls reached a peak in September 2014, they have fallen 16 percent. Manufacturing payrolls rose slightly in January, but payroll gains have been very slow over the past year. Employment in the temporary help industry contracted in January. The industry has seen no net change in payrolls since October.

Average hourly pay in private companies edged up in January. The average nominal wage was 2.5 percent higher than its level 12 months earlier. This is a faster rate of improvement compared with what we saw earlier in the recovery, when annual pay gains averaged about 2.0 percent a year. The modest acceleration in nominal pay gains has occurred against the backdrop of slowing consumer price inflation. The combination has given workers real wage gains approaching 2.0 percent over the past year.

The BLS household survey showed a small drop in unemployment. The jobless rate fell to 4.9 percent, just 0.3 points above its average level in 2007, the last year before the Great Recession. The drop in unemployment was the result of a rise in the number of survey respondents who were employed. The labor force participation rate increased in January, and it has increased 0.3 points since October.

This rebound in labor force participation is modest compared with the drop that occurred between 2008 and 2015. From 2007 to January 2016 the adult participation rate fell 3.4 percentage points. Roughly half the drop is traceable to population aging, but the other half is due to factors related to the deep slump or to long-term factors that have affected Americans’ willingness to enter or remain in the workforce. If we assume all of the drop was due to factors that have temporarily discouraged jobless adults from seeking work, then we can recalculate the unemployment rate to reflect the rate we would see if all of these discouraged workers were reclassified as unemployed. That calculation suggests the current unemployment rate would be about 7.4 percent rather than 4.9 percent.

It is of course unlikely all the adults who’ve dropped out the labor force would stream back in if job finding got easier and real wages continued to rise. It is encouraging to see, however, that participation is now climbing after a long period of decline. Over the past four months, the labor force participation rate of 25-54 year-olds increased 0.5 percentage points.

      

The latest BLS jobs report shows little sign employers are worried about the future strength of the recovery. Both the employer and household surveys suggest U.S. employers have an undiminished appetite for new hires. Nonfarm payrolls surged 242,000 in February, and upward revisions BLS employment estimates for January added almost 21,000 to estimated payroll gains in that month.

The household survey shows even bigger job gains in recent months. An additional 530,000 respondents said they were employed in February compared with January. This follows reported employment gains of 485,000 and 615,000 in December and January. Over the past year the household survey showed employment gains that averaged 237,000 per month. In comparison, the employer survey reported payroll gains averaging 223,000 a month.

These monthly gains are about three times faster than the job growth needed to keep the unemployment rate from climbing. As a result, the unemployment rate has fallen over the past year, reaching 4.9 percent in January. The jobless rate remained unchanged in February because of a continued influx of adults into the workforce. An additional 555,000 people entered the labor force, capping a three-month period which saw the labor force grow by over 500,000 a month. The labor force participation rate continued to inch up, rising 0.2 percentage points in February compared with the previous month. Since reaching a 38-year low in September 2015, the labor force participation rate has risen 0.5 points.

More than half the decline in the participation rate between the onset of the Great Recession and today is traceable to the aging of the adult population. A growing share of Americans are in late middle age or past 65, ages when we anticipate participation rates will decline. If we focus on the population between 25 and 54, the participation rate stopped declining in 2013 and has edged up 0.6 percentage points since hitting its low point. The employment-to-population rate of 25-54 year-olds has increased 3.0 percentage points since reaching a low in 2009 and 2010. Using the employment rate of 25-54 year-olds as an indicator of labor market tightness, we have recovered about 60 percent of the employment-rate drop that occurred in the Great Recession. Eliminating the rest of the decline will require a further increase in prime-age labor force participation.

Two other indicators suggest the job market remains some distance from a full recovery. More than a quarter of the 7.8 million unemployed have been jobless 6 months or longer. The number of long-term unemployed is about 70 percent higher than was the case just before the Great Recession. Nearly 6 million Americans who hold part-time jobs indicate they want to work on full-time schedules. They cannot do so because they have been assigned part-time hours or can only find a part-time job. The number of workers in this position is more than one-third higher than the comparable number back in 2007. Nonetheless, nearly all indicators of labor market tightness have displayed continued improvement in recent months.

February’s surge in employment growth and labor force participation was accompanied by an unexpected drop in nominal wages. Average hourly pay fell from $25.38 to $25.35 per hour. Compared with average earnings 12 months ago, workers saw a 2.2 percent rise in nominal hourly earnings. Because inflation is low, this probably translates into a real wage gain of about 1 percent. While employers may have an undiminished appetite for new hires, they show little inclination to boost the pace of wage increases.

       

       

       

I have been writing for years about the Armenian Genocide. The issue is of great emotional as much as ethical and historical significance to me. But for reasons I will explain for the first time, 1915 is also a very personal matter for me. No, not because I suddenly discovered I am of Armenian descent, but mainly because 1915 is the main reason my career took a turn toward academia rather than diplomacy.

I did not join the Foreign Service because I was detained almost 20 years ago, when I was a 25-year-old tour guide. The reason? I dared to answer a couple of questions about 1915 from a group of American tourists visiting the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara. That day changed my life. I'm not naïve; I knew answering their question in public would be risky. And I would have probably refrained from doing so had they not asked me first whether there is freedom of speech in Turkey. Trying to make light of it, I quipped: "Yes, there is freedom of speech, but freedom after speech can get tricky." I did not know my joke would turn into self-fulfilling prophecy.

Shortly after explaining to my group why the term “genocide” is problematic for Turkish officialdom, I was arrested by guards in the museum, taken to a police station and interrogated for five hours. This unexpected encounter with Turkish law enforcement convinced me about a couple of things. First, I realized how difficult life in Turkey would be if I were of Armenian descent. "Are you Armenian?" was the first question I was asked in the police station. When I said "No," the police officer laughed and said I was not the first Turkish traitor they had interrogated. To this day, I wonder how life in Turkey would be if my name was Onik instead of Ömer.

Second, I was also convinced that I no longer wanted to become a diplomat. As a diplomat, I knew you turn into a defense attorney for your country. I also knew that in the larger scheme of things, what happened to me that day was not tragic or even very consequential. But the idea of defending a country that arrests a tour guide for speaking about what happened 100 years ago turned me off intellectually and emotionally. All of a sudden, Turkey's predicament had gained a disturbingly personal dimension in my eyes and thoughts. I remember having a conversation the night I was arrested with my father, a Turkish diplomat himself and in disbelief about my lack of situational awareness. "Do you think you think you live in Sweden?" he asked me with sarcasm and some anger. Anyway, the case was closed for me. I now had a police detention record. And this was enough to disqualify me from the Foreign Ministry exam.

Since the Turkish Foreign Service had now lost a brilliant (!) future diplomat, I turned my gaze to academia and decided to continue my seditious activities in the United States by writing a dissertation on Turkey's identity problem. My focus was on the interplay between Kemalism, the official ideology of the republic and the Kurdish question and political Islam. Ever since I started working in academia and think-tanks, I made an involuntary reputation for myself as a public intellectual with pro-Kurdish, pro-Islamic, pro-Armenian tendencies. I guess that's a small price to pay for trying to be a liberal in today's Turkey. The alternative would have been a life in Turkish diplomacy talking about the "so-called Armenian Genocide,” the separatist-terrorist organization called the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and various "coup" attempts against the sacred Turkish state during the Gezi protests and the corruption investigations.

At the end of day, my arrest 20 years ago was a blessing in disguise. I'm happy my Armenian journey took me where I am.

This article was originally published in Today's Zaman.

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

       

The 2016 Brown Center Report (BCR), which was published last week, presented a study of Common Core State Standards (CCSS).   In this post, I’d like to elaborate on a topic touched upon but deserving further attention: what to expect in Common Core’s immediate political future. I discuss four key challenges that CCSS will face between now and the end of the year.

Let’s set the stage for the discussion.  The BCR study produced two major findings.  First, several changes that CCSS promotes in curriculum and instruction appear to be taking place at the school level.  Second, states that adopted CCSS and have been implementing the standards have registered about the same gains and losses on NAEP as states that either adopted and rescinded CCSS or never adopted CCSS in the first place.  These are merely associations and cannot be interpreted as saying anything about CCSS’s causal impact.  Politically, that doesn’t really matter. The big story is that NAEP scores have been flat for six years, an unprecedented stagnation in national achievement that states have experienced regardless of their stance on CCSS.  Yes, it’s unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores.  No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic.

"Yes, it’s unfair, but CCSS is paying a political price for those disappointing NAEP scores. No clear NAEP differences have emerged between CCSS adopters and non-adopters to reverse that political dynamic."

TIMSS and PISA scores in November-December

NAEP has two separate test programs.  The scores released in 2015 were for the main NAEP, which began in 1990.  The long term trend (LTT) NAEP, a different test that was first given in 1969, has not been administered since 2012.  It was scheduled to be given in 2016, but was cancelled due to budgetary constraints.  It was next scheduled for 2020, but last fall officials cancelled that round of testing as well, meaning that the LTT NAEP won’t be given again until 2024.  

With the LTT NAEP on hold, only two international assessments will soon offer estimates of U.S. achievement that, like the two NAEP tests, are based on scientific sampling:  PISA and TIMSS.  Both tests were administered in 2015, and the new scores will be released around the Thanksgiving-Christmas period of 2016.  If PISA and TIMSS confirm the stagnant trend in U.S. achievement, expect CCSS to take another political hit.  America’s performance on international tests engenders a lot of hand wringing anyway, so the reaction to disappointing PISA or TIMSS scores may be even more pronounced than what the disappointing NAEP scores generated.

Is teacher support still declining?

Watch Education Next’s survey on Common Core (usually released in August/September) and pay close attention to teacher support for CCSS.  The trend line has been heading steadily south. In 2013, 76 percent of teachers said they supported CCSS and only 12 percent were opposed.  In 2014, teacher support fell to 43 percent and opposition grew to 37 percent.  In 2015, opponents outnumbered supporters for the first time, 50 percent to 37 percent.  Further erosion of teacher support will indicate that Common Core’s implementation is in trouble at the ground level.  Don’t forget: teachers are the final implementers of standards.

An effort by Common Core supporters to change NAEP

The 2015 NAEP math scores were disappointing.  Watch for an attempt by Common Core supporters to change the NAEP math tests. Michael Cohen, President of Achieve, a prominent pro-CCSS organization, released a statement about the 2015 NAEP scores that included the following: "The National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, should carefully review its frameworks and assessments in order to ensure that NAEP is in step with the leadership of the states. It appears that there is a mismatch between NAEP and all states' math standards, no matter if they are common standards or not.” 

Reviewing and potentially revising the NAEP math framework is long overdue.  The last adoption was in 2004.  The argument for changing NAEP to place greater emphasis on number and operations, revisions that would bring NAEP into closer alignment with Common Core, also has merit.  I have a longstanding position on the NAEP math framework. In 2001, I urged the National Assessment Governing Board (NAGB) to reject the draft 2004 framework because it was weak on numbers and operations—and especially weak on assessing student proficiency with whole numbers, fractions, decimals, and percentages.  

Common Core’s math standards are right in line with my 2001 complaint.  Despite my sympathy for Common Core advocates’ position, a change in NAEP should not be made because of Common Core.  In that 2001 testimony, I urged NAGB to end the marriage of NAEP with the 1989 standards of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the math reform document that had guided the main NAEP since its inception.  Reform movements come and go, I argued.  NAGB’s job is to keep NAEP rigorously neutral.  The assessment’s integrity depends upon it.  NAEP was originally intended to function as a measuring stick, not as a PR device for one reform or another.  If NAEP is changed it must be done very carefully and should be rooted in the mathematics children must learn.  The political consequences of it appearing that powerful groups in Washington, DC are changing “The Nation’s Report Card” in order for Common Core to look better will hurt both Common Core and NAEP.

Will Opt Out grow?

Watch the Opt Out movement.  In 2015, several organized groups of parents refused to allow their children to take Common Core tests.  In New York state alone, about 60,000 opted out in 2014, skyrocketing to 200,000 in 2015.  Common Core testing for 2016 begins now and goes through May.  It will be important to see whether Opt Out can expand to other states, grow in numbers, and branch out beyond middle- and upper-income neighborhoods.

Conclusion

Common Core is now several years into implementation.  Supporters have had a difficult time persuading skeptics that any positive results have occurred. The best evidence has been mixed on that question.  CCSS advocates say it is too early to tell, and we’ll just have to wait to see the benefits.  That defense won’t work much longer.  Time is running out.  The political challenges that Common Core faces the remainder of this year may determine whether it survives.

       

As government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out next year, Congress should re-evaluate the costs of the program.

Nine million people in America today are receiving Social Security Disability Insurance, double the number in 1995 and six times the number in 1970. With statistics like that, it’s hardly surprising to see some in Congress worry that more will enroll in the program and costs would continue to rise, especially since government funding for disability insurance is expected to run out by the end of next year. If Congress does nothing, benefits would fall by 19% immediately following next year’s presidential election. So, Congress will likely do something. But what exactly should it do?

Funding for disability insurance has nearly run out of money before. Each time, Congress has simply increased the share of the Social Security payroll tax that goes for disability insurance. This time, however, many members of Congress oppose such a shift unless it is linked to changes that curb eligibility and promote return to work. They fear that rolls will keep growing and costs would keep rising, but findings from a report by a government panel conclude that disability insurance rolls have stopped rising and will likely shrink. The report, authored by a panel of the Social Security Advisory Board, is important in that many of the factors that caused disability insurance to rise, particularly during the Great Recession, have ended.

• Baby-boomers, who added to the rolls as they reached the disability-prone middle age years, are aging out of disability benefits and into retirement benefits. 


• The decades-long flood of women increased the pool of people with the work histories needed to be eligible for disability insurance. But women’s labor force participation has fallen a bit from pre-Great Recession peaks, and is not expected again to rise materially. 


• The Great Recession, which led many who lost jobs and couldn’t find work to apply for disability insurance, is over and applications are down. A recession as large as that of 2008 is improbable any time soon. 


• Approval rates by administrative law judges, who for many years were suspected of being too ready to approve applications, have been falling. Whatever the cause, this stringency augurs a fall in the disability insurance rolls.

      

At an event this past week, Hillary Clinton announced that, if elected, she planned to put Bill Clinton in charge of creating jobs. If he becomes the “First Gentlemen” -- or as she prefers to call him, the “First Dude,” – he just might have some success in this role. The country’s very strong record of job creation during the first Clinton administration is a hopeful sign. (Full disclosure: I served in his Administration.)

But assuming he's given the role of jobs czar, what would Bill Clinton do? The uncomfortable fact is that no one knows how to create enough jobs. Although about 50 percent of the public, according to Pew, worries that there are not enough jobs available, and virtually every presidential candidate is promising to produce more, economists are not sure how to achieve this goal.

The debate centers around why we think people are jobless. Unless we can agree on the diagnosis, we will not be able to fashion an appropriate policy response.

Some economists think that an unemployment rate hovering around 5 percent constitutes “full employment.” Those still looking for jobs, in this view, are either simply transitioning voluntarily from one job to another or they are “structurally unemployed.” The latter term refers to a mismatch, either between a worker’s skills and the skills that employers are seeking, or between where the workers live and where the jobs are geographically. (The decline in housing values or tighter zoning restrictions, for example, may have made it more difficult for people to move to states or cities where jobs are more available.)

Another view is that despite the recovery from the Great Recession, there is still a residue of “cyclical” unemployment. If the Federal Reserve or Congress were to boost demand by keeping interest rates low, reducing taxes, or increasing spending on, say, infrastructure, this would create more jobs – or so goes the argument. But the Fed can’t reduce interest rates significantly because they are already near rock-bottom levels and tax and spending policies are hamstrung by political disagreements.

In my view, the U.S. currently suffers from both structural and cyclical unemployment. The reason I believe there is still some room to stimulate the economy is because we have not yet seen a significant increase in labor costs and inflation. Political problems aside, we should be adding more fuel to the economy in the form of lower taxes or higher public spending.

High levels of structural unemployment are also a problem. The share of working-age men who are employed has been dropping for decades at least in part because of outsourcing and automation. The share of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than six months is also relatively high for an economy at this stage of the business cycle. One possibility is that the recession caused many workers to drop out of the labor force and that after a long period of joblessness, they have seen their skills atrophy and employers stigmatize them as unemployable.

The depressing fact is that none of these problems is easy to solve. Manufacturing jobs that employ a lot of people are not coming back. Retraining the work force for a high-tech economy will take a long time. Political disagreements won’t disappear unless there is a landslide election that sweeps one party into control of all three branches of government.

So what can Bill Clinton or anyone else do? We may need to debate some more radical solutions such as subsidized jobs or a basic income for the structurally unemployed or a shorter work week to spread the available work around. These may not be politically feasible for some time to come, but former President Clinton is the right person to engage communities and employers in some targeted job creation projects now and to involve the country in a serious debate about what to do about jobs over the longer haul.

Editor's note: This piece originally appeared in Inside Sources.