The long employment slump after the 2008 financial crisis

 Prime-age employment slumped in the aftermath of the crisis, which was understandable, but what’s really striking is how long it stayed depressed — almost to the end of the 2010s.

There was no good reason that far more Americans couldn’t have been employed during that period. After all, inflation stayed low even when employment finally got back to pre-crisis levels. 

So that long era of depressed employment was pure loss, representing vast waste: millions of workers who could have been employed but weren’t, hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of goods and services America could have produced but didn’t.

Paul Krugman NYT 19 July 2022

Opinion | Inflation: A Revolution of Falling Expectations - The New York Times (nytimes.com)