Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor and chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I'm the editor-in-chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Kyla Scanlon. She is a contributor to Bloomberg, a leading

economics writer, the author of the new book in this economy, how money and markets really work.

Kyla Scanlon, thank you so much for joining us on Card Affairs today.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

Your title has italics and a question mark, so I had to make sure to get the emphasis right. I was fairly

proud of that. No, you did a great job. Yeah. It's a question. Well, it is a question. And interestingly,

I opened my copy of the New York Times this morning and I saw something that confused me. And your

expertise is in clearing up people's confusion. You say in the book, your aim is to get

ordinary people to have a draft, economics education for all. So I want to just read you what I wrote,

which gave me a big question mark, and maybe you can clear it up. Government's monthly Jaws Report.

It says sometimes the numbers of the government's jobs report

come together to pay and be clear, coherent picture of the strengths or weakness of the U.S. labor

market. This is not one of those times. The report showed employers added 272,000 on agricultural

jobs in May, far more than forecasters were expecting. Hooray! The data from another survey

showed that the number of people

who were employed last month fell by $408,000 while the unemployment rate rose to 4%. Is this good?

Is this bad? How does the ordinary person reading their newspaper see something like this

and try and answer the question to themselves, you know,

what's going on? Yeah, labor market data is super confusing. So we actually got another labor

market report earlier in the week called Jolts. It's a job openings and labor turnover survey.

And that also showed a slowdown to the labor market, so less job openings, less

...