The natural rate of unemployment
Policymakers have spent half a century in search of the natural rate of unemployment. The fifth in our series
WHY does unemployment exist? If there is a central question in macroeconomics, this is it. There are few bigger wastes than the loss to idleness of hours, days and years by people who would rather be working. Unemployment can ruin lives, sink budgets and topple governments. Yet policymakers do not wage all-out war on joblessness. Most, like the Federal Reserve, America’s central bank, target what is known as unemployment’s “natural” rate, at which inflation is stable.
This article appeared in the Schools brief section of the print edition under the headline “Central bankers’ holy grail”
Schools brief August 26th 2017
From the August 26th 2017 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionDiscover more
AI needs regulation, but what kind, and how much?
Different countries are taking different approaches to regulating artificial intelligence
LLMs will transform medicine, media and more
But not without a helping (human) hand
How AI models are getting smarter
Deep neural networks are learning diffusion and other tricks
The race is on to control the global supply chain for AI chips
The focus is no longer just on faster chips, but on more chips clustered together
AI firms will soon exhaust most of the internet’s data
Can they create more?
A short history of AI
In the first of six weekly briefs, we ask how AI overcame decades of underdelivering