David G Blanchflower

This is an appallingly written book. It does not know what it is about or what its audience is. The title suggests it is about unemployment; the introductory chapter says it is about the rise of Trump and Brexit; and there are huge, boring swathes of the authors' recollections of his participation in the UK equivalent of the Fed. The introductory chapter also makes it clear this is a book for a lay audience, but the authors gets tripped up and does not bother to explain things that would have made his points clearer. He gets lost in tangents and I had trouble following his train of thought. Twice I caught him repeating the same sentence/paragraph from a few pages prior; this is just inexcusable.

The book makes a case for monetary policy-makers to be OK with extremely low unemployment rates (like 2.5%), because the meaning of unemployment statistics has been distorted over time, as discouraged workers increasingly leave the labor force (although he does not talk about this as much as I thought he would) and as "unemployed" workers are counted as "employed". The inflationary potential of extremely low unemployment rates, he argues is overblown.

Well, now we are in the throws of major inflation and policymakers want to sacrifice low-income folks by raising rates and letting unemployment rise. This book does not help someone navigate the policy controversies we are not experiencing 4 years after it was written. I don't begrudge his inability to foresee the pandemic, but I do want to argue that he suffered from a myopia--being too caught up to write superficially about current events (e.g. the causal links between social conditions and voter resentment)--to really help lay people understand the policy debates.… (altro)