Jobs are hard to fill, and ideology makes it hard to understand why

Telling one story about why employers are struggling to hire workers doesn’t come close to explaining what is going on with the job market.

Economists expect Friday’s employment report to show that the economy added 706,000 jobs in June, a step up from May’s 559,000 and what would in normal times be a big number. These aren’t normal times, though. The U.S. is still 7.6 million jobs short of what it had before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, and earlier this year there were hopes that, as more Americans got vaccinated, the job market would be closing that gap far more quickly than it has. READ MORE