Is There Economic And Political Meaning In "The Wizard of Oz?"

 

To get a handle on this, you can read Money and Politics in the Land of Oz By Quentin P. Taylor.  Below is an excerpt from the Taylor paper:

"Dorothy, the protagonist of the story, represents an individualized ideal of the American people. She is each of us at our best-kind but self-respecting, guileless but levelheaded, wholesome but plucky. She is akin to Everyman, or, in modern parlance, “the girl next door.” Dorothy lives in Kansas, where virtually everything-the treeless prairie, the sun-beaten grass, the paint-stripped house, even Aunt Em and Uncle Henry-is a dull, drab, lifeless gray. This grim depiction reflects the forlorn condition of Kansas in the late 1880s and early 1890s, when a combination of scorching droughts, severe winters, and an invasion of grasshoppers reduced the prairie to an uninhabitable wasteland. The result for farmers and all who depended on agriculture for their livelihood was devastating. Many ascribed their misfortune to the natural elements, called it quits, and moved on. Others blamed the hard times on bankers, the railroads, and various middlemen who seemed to profit at the farmers’ expense. Angry victims of the Kansas calamity also took aim at the politicians, who often appeared indifferent to their plight. Around these economic and political grievances, the Populist movement coalesced.

In the late 1880s and early 1890s, Populism spread rapidly throughout the Midwest and into the South, but Kansas was always the site of its most popular and radical elements. In 1890, Populist candidates began winning seats in state legislatures and Congress, and two years later Populists in Kansas gained control of the lower house of the state assembly, elected a Populist governor, and sent a Populist to the U.S. Senate. The twister that carries Dorothy to Oz symbolizes the Populist cyclone that swept across Kansas in the early 1890s. Baum was not the first to use the metaphor. Mary E. Lease, a fire-breathing Populist orator, was often referred to as the “Kansas Cyclone,” and the free-silver movement was often likened to a political whirlwind that had taken the nation by storm. Although Dorothy does not stand for Lease, Baum did give her (in the stage version) the last name “Gale”-a further pun on the cyclone metaphor.

The name of Dorothy’s canine companion, Toto, is also a pun, a play on teetotaler. Prohibitionists were among the Populists’ most faithful allies, and the Populist hope William Jennings Bryan was himself a “dry.” As Dorothy embarks on the Yellow Brick Road, Toto trots “soberly” behind her, just as the Prohibitionists soberly followed the Populists.

When Dorothy’s twister-tossed house comes to rest in Oz, it lands squarely on the wicked Witch of the East, killing her instantly. The startled girl emerges from the abode to find herself in a strange land of remarkable beauty, whose inhabitants, the diminutive Munchkins, rejoice at the death of the Witch. The Witch represents eastern financial-industrial interests and their gold-standard political allies, the main targets of Populist venom. Midwestern farmers often blamed their woes on the nefarious practices of Wall Street bankers and the captains of industry, whom they believed were engaged in a conspiracy to “enslave” the “little people,” just as the Witch of the East had enslaved the Munchkins. Populists viewed establishment politicians, including presidents, as helpless pawns or willing accomplices. Had not President Cleveland bowed to eastern bankers by repealing the Silver Purchase Act in 1893, thus further restricting much-needed credit? Had not McKinley (prompted by the wealthy industrialist Mark Hanna) made the gold standard the centerpiece of his campaign against Bryan and free silver?"

Now an excerpt from a book by Irivin B. Tucker:

"Gold is always a fascinating story: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was first published in 1900 and this children's tale has been interpreted as an allegory for political and economic events of the 1890s. For example, the Yellow Brick Road represents the gold standard, Oz in the title is an abbreviation for ounce, Dorothy is the naive public, Emerald City symbolizes Washington, D.C., the Tin Woodman represents the industrial worker, the Scarecrow is the farmer, and the Cyclone is a metaphor for a political revolution. In the end, Dorothy discovers magical powers in her silver shoes (changed to ruby in the 1939 film) to find her way home and not the fallacy of the Yellow Brick Road. Although the author of the story, L. Frank Baum, never stated it was his intention, it can be argued that the issue of the story concerns the election of 1896. Democratic presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan (the Cowardly Lion) supported fixing the value of the dollar to both gold and silver (bimetallism), but Republican William McKinley (the Wicked Witch) advocated using only the gold standard. Since McKinley won, the United States remained on the Yellow Brick Road."

But not everyone agrees with this. Economist Bradley Hansen wrote an article titled The Fable of the Allegory: The Wizard of Oz in Economics in the Journal of Economic Education in 2002. Here is his conclusion:

"Rockoff noted that the empirical evidence that Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an allegory was slim, but he compared an allegorical interpretation to a model and suggested that “economists should not have any difficulty accepting, at least provisionally, an elegant but controversial model” (Rockoff 1990, 757). He was right—we did not have any difficulty accepting it. Despite Rockoff’s warning, we appear to have accepted the story wholeheartedly rather than provisionally, simply because of its elegance. It is as difficult to prove that The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was not a monetary allegory as it is to prove that it was. In the end, we will never know for certain what Baum was thinking when he wrote the book. I suggest that the vast majority of the evidence weighs heavily against the allegorical interpretation. It should be remembered that no record exists that Baum ever acknowledged any political meanings in the story and that no one even suggested such an interpretation until the 1960s. There certainly does not seem to be sufficient evidence to overwhelm Baum’s explicit statement in the introduction of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz that his sole purpose was to entertain children and not to impress upon them some moral. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a great story. Telling students that the Populist movement was like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz does seem to catch their attention. It may be a useful pedagogical tool to illuminate the debate on bimetallism, but we should stop telling our students that it was written for that purpose."

I found a review of the book in the NY Times from 1900 and it does not mention anything about OZ having political or economic meaning. The book was also made into a musical a few years later and none of the reviews of the musical mention any political or economic meaning.

The Law of Supply Seems to Be Working in the San Antonio Apartment Market

The law of supply says "There is a positive or direct relationship between P and Quantity Supplied, ceteris paribus (holding all other factors constant). So as the price rises, producers will offer more for sale.

Rents are way up but so is construction on new apartments.

See ‘Pretty crazy’ rent increases in San Antonio are driving unusual boom in apartment construction by Madison Iszler of The San Antonio Express-News. Excerpts:

"Rental rates in San Antonio and other U.S. cities have risen sharply over the past year, fueled by surging house prices, tightening supply and an increase in the number of people seeking their own space after living with relatives.

Though more apartments are in the works, renters won’t see a big increase in inventory this year.

The median rent in San Antonio jumped to $1,222 in March, up 15.1 percent from the same month last year and 16.8 percent since March 2020 at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, according to home search website Apartment List."

"San Antonio-area builders sought permits for construction of 15,254 units last year, a “jaw-dropping” number that was well over twice levels in 2020 and 2019, the report notes.

About 17,657 units are currently under construction but only about 5,174 are expected to be completed this year."

A High School Banned Students From Selling Snacks. Predictably, a Black Market for Snacks Emerged.

A sociologist spent 112 days tracking students' illicit deals for chips and other goodies

By Eric Boehm of Reason Magazine. Excerpts:

"When Carlos got pinched by the fuzz, he was holding some hot commodities.

Flaming hot, in fact.

No, that's not slang. The illegal behavior that landed Carlos (not his real name), a ninth-grade student at a high school in the southern suburbs of Chicago, in the deans' office on a mid-September morning in 2019 was the illicit sale of chips to one of his fellow students. For the crime, he was summarily sentenced to a one-day suspension from school—and his mother was called to pick him up.

As Karlyn Gorski, a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Chicago, relates in a paper recently published in the journal Youth & Society, Carlos is just one small part of a robust black market for snack foods that persists at Hamilton High (not the school's real name) despite the best efforts by school administrators, security guards, and teachers to stamp it out. The punishment handed out to Carlos for his busted chip-deal was actually a light sentence, Gorski explains, with administrators granting leniency on the grounds that Carlos was a freshman and might not yet understand the school's zero-tolerance policy for unapproved exercises of snack-related capitalism. Repeat offenders, she writes, faced in-school suspensions—the high school equivalent of solitary confinement.

Gorski spent 112 days observing students and adults at Hamilton during the 2019–2020 school year, though her research was cut short by the school's closure due to the COVID-19 pandemic. While there, she observed a widespread black market for snack sales. The perpetrators were mere children, but they organized "elaborate strategies to hide sales, build networks of sellers, and develop a verbal shorthand around the market."

By outlawing the sale of snacks, the school ensured that only outlaws would sell snacks."

"the paper contains some serious implications about what the school is teaching its students. "Adult responses to youth behaviors can produce a stigma of deviance around activities that, in other contexts, are permitted or even lauded," Gorski explains.

Within the school environment, not all snack sales were illicit. Students in a Spanish club selling cookies to raise money for a field trip to Peru were allowed to "carry their wares openly and advertise on posters throughout the school," writes Gorski. "Sellers working for their own gain did not have the luxury of such promotion. When the profits of snack sales benefitted organizations that fell under the school's purview, they were lauded; the school retained control over the proceeds, ensuring the money went to something 'worthy.'""

"The high school snack policies that are the subject of Gorski's paper form an eerily effective microcosm of similar arrangements in other parts of the world. Prohibition, which banned the serving of alcohol in the United States for more than a decade in the early 20th century, produced a black market that kept the booze flowing to those who had access to the necessary money and connections. Drug prohibition has produced many of the same outcomes.

Gorski points to an even more pernicious parallel: prisons, where the passing of illegal goods ranging from cigarettes to hard drugs is similarly handled via a black market. Indeed, the government can't even keep drugs out of prisons—how could the drug war be anything but a failure everywhere else?

Still, treating innocuous behavior as criminal forces students to behave more like criminals in order to continue engaging in the market. Those patterns are the opposite of what schools should be teaching."

Related posts:

Cartels: They're not just for drug dealers and oil producers anymore-maple syrup producers have one, too (2016-There was a black market for syrup) 

There Is A Black Market On Capitol Hill (2014-Another black market for snacks)

Should People Be Allowed To Sell Their Kidneys And Other Organs? (2010)

How Odysseus Started The Industrial Revolution

 Factory work may have been a commitment device to get everyone to work hard. Odysseus tying himself to the mast was also a commitment device. Dean Karlan, Yale economics professor explains how commitment devices work:

"This idea of forcing one’s own future behavior dates back in our culture at least to Odysseus, who had his crew tie him to the ship’s mast so he wouldn’t be tempted by the sirens; and Cortes, who burned his ships to show his army that there would be no going back.

Economists call this method of pushing your future self into some behavior a “commitment device.” [Related: a Freakonomics podcast on the topic is called "Save Me From Myself."] From my WSJ op-ed:

Most of us don’t have crews and soldiers at our disposal, but many people still find ways to influence their future selves. Some compulsive shoppers will freeze their credit cards in blocks of ice to make sure they can’t get at them too readily when tempted. Some who are particularly prone to the siren song of their pillows in the morning place their alarm clock far from their bed, on the other side of the room, forcing their future self out of bed to shut it off. When MIT graduate student Guri Nanda developed an alarm clock, Clocky, that rolls off a night stand and hides when it goes off, the market beat a path to her door."

 See What Can We Learn From Congress and African Farmers About Losing Weight?

Something like this came up recently in the New York Times, in reference to factory work and the Industrial Revolution. See Looking at Productivity as a State of Mind. From the NY Times, 9-27-2014. By SENDHIL MULLAINATHAN, a professor of economics at Harvard. Excerpts:

"Greg Clark, a professor of economics at the University of California, Davis, has gone so far as to argue that the Industrial Revolution was in part a self-control revolution. Many economists, beginning with Adam Smith, have argued that factories — an important innovation of the Industrial Revolution — blossomed because they allowed workers to specialize and be more productive.

Professor Clark argues that work rules truly differentiated the factory. People working at home could start and finish when they wanted, a very appealing sort of flexibility, but it had a major drawback, he said. People ended up doing less work that way.

Factories imposed discipline. They enforced strict work hours. There were rules for when you could go home and for when you had to show up at the beginning of your shift. If you arrived late you could be locked out for the day. For workers being paid piece rates, this certainly got them up and at work on time. You can even see something similar with the assembly line. Those operations dictate a certain pace of work. Like a running partner, an assembly line enforces a certain speed.

As Professor Clark provocatively puts it: “Workers effectively hired capitalists to make them work harder. They lacked the self-control to achieve higher earnings on their own.”

The data entry workers in our study, centuries later, might have agreed with that statement. In fact, 73 percent of them did agree to this statement: “It would be good if there were rules against being absent because it would help me come to work more often.”"

The workers, like Odyssues, tied themselves to the mast to resist the temptation of slacking. This made it possible for factories to generate the large output of the Industrial Revolution.

ESG Investing Can Do Good or Do Well, but Don’t Expect Both

The claim that investors will make more money investing in green bonds is patently absurd. This is the second in a series of Streetwise columns on sustainable investing.

By James Mackintosh of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The biggest and boldest claim of ESG investors is that investing based on environmental, social and governance conditions will not just improve our world, but make you more money. I have problems with both parts of the claim. The burgeoning market for green bonds shows the difficulties clearly, and stocks with a sustainability label aren’t so different.

Green bonds, where governments or companies promise to spend at least some of the proceeds on something environmentally friendly, are having their moment. More were sold last year than ever, and this year global issuance is forecast by BNP Paribas to climb another 60% to $900 billion. The U.K.’s first green government issue, last summer, attracted the highest demand ever for a British bond, and the green tinge is rapidly spreading from Europe to the rest of the world.

The claim that investors will make more money investing in green bonds is patently absurd. Green bonds typically have a slightly lower yield than a standard bond from the same issuer. This locks in guaranteed underperformance for taking identical risks that the government or company will fail to pay the bonds back.

Worse, the rapidly expanding sales of sovereign green bonds of developed countries are doing nothing for the environment, and most corporate green bonds achieve nothing either."

"The underperformance of green bonds is easy to demonstrate, and shows up in the “greenium”—the higher price, and so lower yield, for a green bond. In the case of the U.K.’s green gilt, as British government bonds are known, this showed up as a yield about 0.02 percentage points lower than would be expected from a normal gilt with a similar maturity. In Germany, where the comparison is simplified by matching green and traditional bonds, the green bond has a yield 0.05 percentage points lower. Holding these green bonds until maturity guarantees worse performance than those who hold ordinary bonds.

Investors who want to stop global warming might be happy to stump up a little extra to achieve their aims. The U.K. government, like all green-bond issuers, promises to spend the money on green projects, which include renewable energy, clean transportation and flood-control measures. 

Investors shouldn’t bother: The British government, in common with all developed democracies, sets its spending priorities before deciding how to finance them. All these green projects would have happened anyway. In the jargon of green finance, there is no “additionality” from the bonds—and there shouldn’t be. In a democracy, it is voters, not global financiers, who decide government spending priorities."

"This trade-off between trying to do the right thing and making more money is obvious in bonds. But it is fiercely disputed by ESG investors in stocks, even though the same issues apply."

"A company doing everything right on ESG might still be wildly overpriced; an all-male, all-white coal-mining-to-tobacco conglomerate run by Dr. Evil could be so cheap as to be a great—if unpleasant—investment. Even if ESG issues matter as their proponents say, the price is a vital determinant of future returns even over long periods. Simply buying “good” companies isn’t a route to outperformance.

Danish clean-energy company Orsted shows the problem: From its extremely high valuation at the start of last year, stock in the poster-child for the zero-carbon transition has plunged 41%, while coal stocks have soared.

If ranking companies by ESG scores really could help identify companies that will produce higher or more stable earnings, those companies should have a higher price, as everyone wants higher and more stable earnings. But once the better profit outlook is priced in, there’s no further outperformance.

The case for doing well by doing good can at best only be temporary; in spite of the thousands of asset managers running trillions of dollars who have signed ESG pledges, advocates have to believe both that ESG helps earnings, and that it still isn’t priced in."

"trawling through the ESG reports isn’t work for do-gooders, it’s for capitalists. “Clean” stocks will sometimes be overpriced and “dirty” stocks sometimes cheap, even after including ESG information, and to profit you have to be willing to sell the clean stocks and buy the dirty ones—the exact opposite of what ESG investors do.

If ESG truly offers rewards to investors, it brings no virtue. If it is virtuous, expect a lower reward."

Related posts

The hidden costs of corporate social responsibility

Why the Sustainable Investment Craze Is Flawed

C.E.O.s Are Qualified to Make Profits, Not Lead Society

ESG Investing in the Pandemic Shows Power of Luck

ESG Investing Shines in Market Turmoil, With Help From Big Tech: The strength of socially responsible funds suggests they have staying power; ‘ESG is not a fad’

Funds that market themselves as sustainable investments aren’t necessarily focused on companies that fight climate change, develop wind turbines or promote diverse boards

ESG Funds Draw SEC Scrutiny (companies that pursue strategies to address environmental, social or governance challenges)

Is it a retailer’s job to keep shoppers from their vices? (or Adam Smith vs. CVS pharmacy)

Can You Find Virtue by Investing in Vice?

What if companies pledge to adhere to social and environmental accountability guidelines?

Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!) 

Data show that socially responsible investments can outperform the S&P 500 index
 
Is altruism a result of selfishness?

Do you have to be selfish to make more money?

Does collective self-deception mask selfish behavior?

Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad

Businesses intentionally display their social and environmental performance in addition to their financial performance to stakeholders

Should you invest according to religious guidelines?

Companies Adapt to Activism by Athletes 

For a humorous view of this issue see

A Snickers a Day Keeps the Doctor Away: Why does CVS want to make my migraine cures hard to find? by Joseph C. Sternberg of the WSJ

 

Why the Sustainable Investment Craze Is Flawed

The first in a series of Streetwise columns about the failed promise of funds guided by environmental, social and governance principles, known as ESG 

By James Mackintosh of The WSJ. Excerpts:

"The financial industry has spotted an opportunity to make money by helping people feel good about themselves. Despite claims to the contrary, these investments don’t do much to make the world a better place.

ESG funds, as they are known, promise to invest in companies with better environmental, social and governance attributes, to save the planet, improve worker conditions or, in the case of the U.S. Vegan Climate ETF, prevent animals from being eaten. 

Money has poured into ESG funds as noisy lobby groups push pension funds, university endowments and some central banks to shift their investments. The United Nations-supported Principles for Responsible Investment says signatories have $121 trillion of assets under management; even assuming lots of double-counting, that is most of the world’s managed money."

"Someone has to take a loss somewhere if fossil fuels are going to be left in the ground rather than extracted and sold. ESG investors’ hope is that the losses will fall on other people. The problem is that less environmentally-minded investors buying those shares, oil wells or power plants are absolutely not going to shut them down unless they stop being profitable.

It might make sense for an investor or company to sell out of fossil fuels early if they think the retreat from coal and oil is inevitable—indeed, that was the pitch by the activist who took on Exxon—but that is simply to invest according to a political prediction, not a way to fight climate change."

ESG supporters can point to what look like successes: Their pressure has encouraged many companies to sell off dirty power plants, mines and, in the case of Anglo-Australian miner BHP, its oil business. It has even forced board changes at Exxon Mobil.

Sadly, selling off assets or shares by itself does nothing to save the planet, because someone else bought them. Just as much oil and coal is dug up and burned as before, under different ownership. And there are plenty of people out there to buy the assets, because never before in history has there been so much private capital operating without the public reporting requirements brought by stock markets.

Rich people who want to make the world greener could make a difference, by buying and closing dirty businesses even when they are profitable. So far, though, this hasn’t happened in any significant way. The pitch from Wall Street fund managers is the exact opposite—that by going green investors can change the world and make more money, not less."

"Some of the biggest sources of fossil fuels are immune to shareholder pressure anyway. Much of the world’s oil is pumped by government-controlled companies, led by Saudi Arabia and Russia. Exxon can be forced to change its approach, but the global supply of oil is still determined by OPEC, as President Biden’s appeal to the cartel to pump more to keep fuel prices down has demonstrated.

There are three big pro-ESG arguments, which sound reasonable, but have major flaws. 

First, if companies treat the environment, workers, suppliers and customers better, it will be better for business. This could work where companies have missed something to boost profits, such as add solar panels on a sunny roof or create a better employee retention program. Early ESG activists plucked the low-hanging fruit here, but management has become painfully aware of changing customer and employee expectations, so there is less opportunity ahead."

"profits can only be maintained by passing the higher costs through into higher prices, and—unless the firm has monopoly power—eventually customers who don’t care will go elsewhere. The alternative is to reduce profits, but ESG investors are almost universally against this.

The second ESG point is that by shunning stocks or bonds of dirty companies, and embracing those of clean companies, it will direct capital away from bad things and toward good ones. After all, a lower stock price or higher borrowing cost in the bond market should make it less attractive for dirty companies to expand, and vice versa for clean companies.

In practice, there has been a very weak link between the cost of capital and overall corporate investment for at least a couple of decades."

he high prices early last year for clean-energy stocks might have encouraged similar corporate investment. The flip side of course is that buying wildly overpriced shares isn’t a good way to make money, as losses of a third or more from this year’s peaks for clean-energy stocks shows. Shifting the cost of capital just might help save the planet, but after the short-term shift in valuations is over, it should lead to underperformance.

The third claim from some ESG investors is that they are just trying to make money, and that involves shunning firms that are taking unpriced risks with the environment, workers or customers. Since they call themselves “sustainable” or use “ESG integration,” funds doing this look very like the rest of the ESG industry. The selection principle of the most popular ESG indexes, for instance, those from MSCI, involves identifying only risks that are financially material.

I would say, sure. If you think the government is going to, say, raise fuel taxes, don’t buy manufacturers of gas-guzzlers. If you think the government will impose more restrictions on coal plants, then coal generation will be an even less attractive investment. 

Equally, if you think customers will be willing to pay more for brands that cut their carbon use, by all means bet on their shares. Just don’t fool yourself that you are making much difference to the world with your investment decision."

Related posts

The hidden costs of corporate social responsibility

C.E.O.s Are Qualified to Make Profits, Not Lead Society

ESG Investing in the Pandemic Shows Power of Luck

ESG Investing Shines in Market Turmoil, With Help From Big Tech: The strength of socially responsible funds suggests they have staying power; ‘ESG is not a fad’

Funds that market themselves as sustainable investments aren’t necessarily focused on companies that fight climate change, develop wind turbines or promote diverse boards

ESG Funds Draw SEC Scrutiny (companies that pursue strategies to address environmental, social or governance challenges)

Is it a retailer’s job to keep shoppers from their vices? (or Adam Smith vs. CVS pharmacy)

Can You Find Virtue by Investing in Vice?

What if companies pledge to adhere to social and environmental accountability guidelines?

Conspicuous Consumption, Conspicuous Virtue, Thorstein Veblen (and Adam Smith, too!) 

Data show that socially responsible investments can outperform the S&P 500 index
 
Is altruism a result of selfishness?

Do you have to be selfish to make more money?

Does collective self-deception mask selfish behavior?

Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad

Businesses intentionally display their social and environmental performance in addition to their financial performance to stakeholders

Should you invest according to religious guidelines?

Companies Adapt to Activism by Athletes 

For a humorous view of this issue see

A Snickers a Day Keeps the Doctor Away: Why does CVS want to make my migraine cures hard to find? by Joseph C. Sternberg of the WSJ

The percentage of 25-54 year-olds employed rose in February

One weakness of the unemployment rate is that if people drop out of the labor force they cannot be counted as an unemployed person and the unemployment rate goes down. They are no longer actively seeking work and it might be because they are discouraged workers. The lower unemployment rate can be misleading in this case. People dropping out of the labor force might indicate a weak labor market.

We could look at the employment to population ratio instead, since that includes those not in the labor force. But that includes everyone over 16 and that means that senior citizens are in the group but many of them have retired. The more that retire, the lower this ratio would be and that might be misleading. It would not necessarily mean the labor market is weak.

But we have this ratio for people age 25-54 (which also eliminates many college age people who might not be looking for work).

The percentage of 25-54 year olds employed was 79.5% in Feb. It was 79.1% in Jan. It was 80.5% in Jan. 2020 and 69.6% in April 2020.  Click here to see the BLS data. The unemployment rate was 3.8% in Feb. Click here to go to that data. The % of those 16 and older employed went from 59.7% up to 59.9%.

Here is a good graph from the St. Louis Fed. It shows that there are 127,164,000 people in the 25-54 year old group. So since we are 1.0 percentage point below the 80.5% of Jan. 2020 (the high point since the previous recession), that is still 1,271,640 fewer jobs (Hat tip: Vance Ginn of the Texas Public Policy Foundation). 

Also, we are up 9.9 percentage points since April 2020 (79.5 - 69.6). That is 90.8% of what we lost from Jan. 2020 to April 2020 (10.9 percentage points or 80.5 - 69.6). Then 9.9/10.9 = 90.8%. So we have gotten about 90.8% of the jobs back. Good, but a significant amount of ground has still has to be made up.  

Here is the timeline graph of the percentage of 25-54 year olds employed since 2012. 

Now since 1948