Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is October 10th, 2016, and my guest is Eric Hurst.

The V Dwayne Rath, Professor of Economics, and the John Chuk faculty fellow at the University

of Chicago Booth School of Business.

He's done extensive research into labor markets, which is our topic for discussion today.

Eric, welcome to Econ Talk.

That's a pleasure to be here.

Let's start with an issue that he's always challenging, which is how the labor market's

doing or how workers are doing.

Inevitably, in public discourse, people look at the unemployment rate, but you, and I'm

sympathetic to this, you put a lot of emphasis on the employment rate, in particular, the

ratio of employment to population, as many economists do.

And in work you've done with current Charles and Matthew, no, to a dig doe, you've looked

at what's happened to that ratio over the last 15 years, 2000 to 2015.

So talk about what's, what has happened, what do we know about that, and then we'll talk

...