Just how broken is Unemployment Insurance? Consider this: During every recession since the 1950s, the federal government has had to step in and prop it up. Of people looking for work, only half qualify for Unemployment Insurance. And just half of those actually receive benefits. That’s what you get from a system designed mostly for factory workers nearly a century ago and then left to the heedless care of states. Benefits vary wildly by state — $235 a week in some, over $800 in others. Most states have — understandably — taken the lesson that they don’t have to fix anything because Washington will step in if the economy gets really bad. This is a scrap-it-and-start-over situation. Many solutions would be better, including a system focused on re-employment that keeps workerbots attached to the labor market, helping businesses prevent layoffs during downturns, and making job-hunting less awful.

The economic pain that Americans experienced in 2022-23 was dubbed the “vibesession,” suggesting that negative public sentiment was out of sync with a healthy economy. But what we were truly experiencing was more like a “ghost recession.” As the Fed squeezed the economy by raising interest rates from zero to above 5% to get inflation under control, only the extraordinary circumstances of the post-pandemic economy kept unemployment low and the economy growing. But if we had a ghost recession, that also means that the nascent 2024 “ghost recovery” screeched to a halt with the radical changes to economic policy this year. Also in this episode: What it means that 911,000 fewer jobs were created from spring 2024-2025, and many metaphor try-outs.

Revenge of the Vibecession | The New Yorker Birth-Death Model FAQ

THE THIN END OF THE WEDGE definition in American English | Collins English Dictionary

Economists’ models of inflation are letting them down [The Economist 2019]

You might have heard recently that a years-long poverty study “found” that giving $333 monthly to kids with poor parents didn’t make a difference. But here's why that’s the wrong takeaway: The "Baby's First Years" study wasn't designed to test cash payments. It is multi-year, ongoing scientific research into how poverty affects child development. Researchers found "selective impacts on preschoolers' brain activity with possibly different impacts across brain frequency bands" — which roughly translates to "this is incredibly complicated and we're still figuring it out," not "money is useless." And yet this rigorous research got reduced to a talking point amid an ongoing policy debate on child tax credits and what it means to lift kids out of poverty.

Paid family and medical leave is a confusing mess: only 27% of private-sector workers get paid leave from their employer. Some others are covered by state programs, but those vary. The rest of us scramble to patch together short-term disability with other paid time off, if we have it. Meanwhile, the United States instead has a federal Family Medical Leave Act that protects unpaid time off. Truth is, sooner or later, nearly everyone needs time away from work to care for a sick spouse, a new baby, a dying parent, or to recover from one’s own illness or injury. And they shouldn’t have to go broke to do it. An idea this popular — supported by about 80% of Americans in polls — shouldn’t be this hard. If paid family and medical leave were added to Social Security, that would give every worker benefits that follow them across jobs and states. The infrastructure already exists. But there’s a lot of heel-dragging in Congress because expanding Social Security can’t be done before dealing with its long-term funding.

Read more:

• Paid Leave Works: Evidence from State Programs [National Partnership for Women & Families 2023] — A good primer on paid family and medical leave.
• Economic Effects of Offering a Federal Paid Family and Medical Leave Program [Congressional Budget Office 2021] — CBO analysis of a version of paid leave that was proposed in the Build Back Better Act, but that died in the Senate.
• A National Paid Leave Program Would Help Workers, Families [Center on Budget and Policy Priorities 2021] — Outline of what would be in a comprehensive program.
• New parents aren’t the only people who need paid family leave [Urban Institute 2018] — Pretty self-explanatory.
• Paid Leave for Illness, Medical Needs, and Disabilities: Issues and Answers [Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute 2020] — Chapter on how this could be implemented from a joint Brookings-AEI project.
• Paid Leave Working Group Request for Information Response [Urban Institute 2024] — Response to Congressional working group’s request for input on paid family leave.

Free breakfast and lunch for every public school student — an idea associated more with countries like Sweden and Finland — should instead be viewed as a truly American policy that liberals and conservatives can both love. Want complete meritocracy? Then you should be furious that some kids can't focus in class or during tests because they're hungry. Want to compete globally? Eating better raises student test scores. Want to make America healthy again? Professional kitchen staff serving nutritionally balanced meals to everyone actually beats harried parents trying to cobble together a lunch sack. Want less government interference? Universal programs eliminate the invasive bureaucratic hassle of asking every student’s family about their income. School meal programs have even been found to lower grocery prices in local communities. Nine states have made free meals universal, and others have expanded access, so this ball is rolling.

Read more:

• Solutions: Free School Meals - by Kathryn Anne Edwards [2024]
• How Free School Meals Went Mainstream - The New York Times [2024]
• School Lunch Debt Statistics: Total + Costs per Student [2025]

Brown paper bags and ketchup as a Vegetable

• A story too good to check: Paul Ryan and the tale of the brown paper bag - The Washington Post [2014]
• Why Michelle Obama Is Wrong on School Lunches | The Heritage Foundation [2014]
• U.S. Holds The Ketchup In Schools - The Washington Post [1981]
• U.S. Federal Register from 1981 [see page 49]

The unemployment rate has been hovering around 4.2%. But in today’s highly unsettled economy, many people feel this headline number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t capture their economic struggles — from slow hiring to working two part-time jobs to recent graduates unable to find work in their fields. But as economist Kathryn Edwards points out, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also measures underemployment (currently 7.9%) as well as discouraged workers and many other indicators of labor market slack. But there’s one thing the government probably should not measure, and that’s skills mismatch, or being “overqualified” for the job you have. In this episode, we also go way, way back to the Great Depression, when social workers and advocates for the unemployed fought to get the government to measure joblessness at all.

Read more:

• True Rate of Unemployment [Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity July 2025]
• Origins of the Unemployment Rate: The Lasting Legacy of Measurement without Theory. [David Card, UC Berkeley and NBER, February 2011]
• THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO A Social Study — W. E. B. DuBOIS
• Case studies of unemployment, compiled by the Unemployment Committee of the National Federation of Settlements
• Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization - 2025 M07 Results [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]
• Table A-11. Unemployed people by reason for unemployment - 2025 M07 Results [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]
• Table A-12. Unemployed people by duration of unemployment - 2025 M07 Results [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Gross Domestic Product is the big dog of economic numbers. But this measure of the economy’s size has massive blind spots. It ignores income inequality and citizens’ wellbeing. It rewards consumption and thus environmental degradation. Yes, it is vital to know if your economy is growing or shrinking and why. And yet maybe GDP shouldn’t be the lodestar. In fact, as economist Kathryn Edwards relays, the person who invented GDP warned us of its limitations.

The "boys and men crisis" conversation set in motion following the 2024 election is now shooting off in erratic directions, leading to a lot of hand-wringing about college enrollment, long-gone factory jobs, and “loss of purpose.” Still, men’s workforce participation has been on a long, slow slide for seven decades, and it is reaching a worrying level. To address that, though, we need to have harder conversations about what truly affects young men disproportionately – things like substance abuse disorders, other addictions like gambling and video games, and criminal records.

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