How exactly does one operate in a data-deprived economy?

From American public media, this is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Rosedall, Tuesday the 21st of October.

It is always to have you along, everybody.

We are going to continue today with the thought experiment that we've been running pretty much since the shutdown started.

Without actual government data to depend on, which way do we think the labor market is going.

We've seen plenty to convince us it's kind of slowed to a crawl. The last four monthly

jobs reports that we got were pretty meh. Job openings have been trending lower. Kristen Schwab

was telling us yesterday, recruiters are seeing a pretty mixed picture as companies hold off investing

in new people. But we're going to

examine the flip side of that labor market coin today because there is something happening out

there that could turn things around. Marketplace's Justin Ho gets us going with labor productivity.

Hiring is a lot weaker than it was back when companies were scrambling to staff up after the

pandemic.

That means people are staying in their jobs longer.

And as people have gotten used to their new rules that they got during the pandemic high

turnover period, they've been more productive in their jobs.

That's George Perks, macro strategist at Bespoke Investment Group.

He says businesses have made themselves more productive since the pandemic too. Imagine you run a bakery.

Maybe you rearrange the layout of your bakeries or change your production process somehow. And suddenly you're now producing a lot more than you were per worker relative to a few years ago.

And producing more bread means generating more profit. And eventually businesses will have to

step in and say, okay, if we want to sell more bread, we need to hire more bakers. In other words,

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