Since mid-2011, the U.S. economy has only been creating jobs at a pace fast enough to raise the employment to population ratio by half a percentage point.

I used to teach my classes that the U.S. economy was so flexible that we would recover 2/5 of the way back to full-employment trends in a year. It has been two years, and rather than seeing the gap between the employment-population ratio and its demographic trend fall from 4.4% points to 2.6% and then to 1.6% points, all it has managed to do has been to fall from 4.4% points to 3.4% points...