Origins of job market troubles hard to pinpoint [View all]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/origins-of-job-market-troubles-hard-to-pinpoint/2012/11/16/243ca40c-2fea-11e2-9f50-0308e1e75445_story.html

Everyone knows that the job market collapsed with the past recession.

But the U.S. employment picture actually began to crumble several years before that, according to new research that suggests that the origins of the current jobs troubles may be harder to pinpoint.

In this view, the jobs crisis began in 2000, when the proportion of U.S. residents of working age with jobs peaked after decades of rising steadily — and then began a decline.

This falloff “represents an historic turnaround in the evolution of U.S. employment,” says Robert A. Moffitt, an economics professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of a new paper on the subject from the National Bur