OxBlog

Friday, November 07, 2003

# Posted 11:12 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

ON THE MOVE: While my knowledge of economics consists largely of what I read in the papers, a couple of statistics in today's NYT struck me as fairly interesting. First, according to this very upbeat news analysis piece, there are 130.13 million individuals in the US workforce, representing 66.11 percent of the adult population. Then, in this even more upbeat op-ed column, it says that anywhere from 27 to 35 million old jobs disappear each year, ulitmatley to be replaced by approximately the same number of new jobs.

As such, one might infer that the average American changes jobs every few years -- a process that can be exhilirating or terrifying depending on one's perspective. On the other hand, it is entirely possible that the population is divided into two blocks of workers, one that changes jobs very frequently and one that doesn't. Thus, what I want to know is how long the average worker stays in the average job, as well as the average income of those workers who leave old jobs and take new ones. With that kind of data, one might be able to tell whether job loss is the curse of the lower-middle class, or the escalator to higher standards of living.
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