Morning Must-Read: Dean Baker: Great Mystery at the Washington Post

If Jeff Bezo would simply plug all of his Washington Post reporters into the St. Louis Fed’s FRED, we would have a much better world:

But we have the world we have, and Dean Baker tries to make it better:

Dean Baker: Great Mystery at the Washington Post, Why are People Without Jobs Unhappy About the Economy?: “Steven Mufson uses a wonkblog piece…

…to speculate on why it is that even though we have been in a recovery for more than five years people are still not happy about the economy. He tells us that President Obama has the same problem as President Bush (I), who got trashed on the economy even though revised data show it had been growing rapidly at the start of 1992. While Mufson seeks out expert analysis to try to resolve this paradox, he might try looking at the data for a moment. No one sees the economy. They don’t what the rate of growth is unless they read about it in the newspaper. What they do know is whether they have a job, whether their job is secure, and their pay is rising. If you ask about these questions the only mystery is why Mufson is wasting our time. In 1992 the employment to population ratio was still 1.5 percentage points below its pre-recession level. That would translate into roughly 3.2 million fewer people having jobs in today’s labor market. The current employment to population ratio is down by close to 4.0 percentage points from pre-recession levels, translating into more than 9.0 million fewer people with jobs. (Some of this is due to retirement of baby boomers.) Wages for most workers have been stagnant or declining in the last five years as was the case in 1992. So the real question here is why any serious people would have any question about why the public is sour on the economy. People care about their living standards and security.