Declining churn in the labor market may be holding back people’s careers and the entire economy. One of the key questions about this phenomenon is whether it’s the temporary result of an especially severe recession, or if some sort of structural changes in the U.S. economy are just making the labor market less dynamic.

David Mericle, an economist at Goldman Sachs, shares the following chart which tracks the overall dynamism of the U.S. labor market, by combining into a single index a range of dynamism measures from several different economics reports: the Job Openings and Labor Turnover survey, known as JOLTS, the Business Employment Dynamics data, and data from the Labor Department’s Current Population Survey on job transitions.

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