Justin Wolfers

I think right now I'm holding my breath and hoping.

Let me answer a couple of the specific questions that you asked and then broaden it out to really answer your question.

So on manufacturing, we're in a manufacturing recession, but equally we've been in one for roughly 40 years in a row now.

The US is losing its manufacturing jobs.

This is a standard part of economic development.

It used to be that this was predominantly an agricultural economy.

and we lost our agricultural jobs as we moved into the factories now we're moving from the factories into services services which often have higher value added productivity higher wages better working conditions and so we're continuing to lose our manufacturing i know there are a lot of people who

have a certain regard for manufacturing.

It was once the pathway to the middle class for working class folks, but we're losing those jobs.

And if you look at the jobs that is replacing them, I don't necessarily mourn it.

So that's what's going on with manufacturing.

We see the economy is barely creating jobs at the moment.

And that's the sense in which I'd say we're on the cusp of a jobs recession.

Which side of that we're on?

Honestly, we're just coming out of a bit of a data blackout.

If you remember, the government was just shut down for a month and a half.

So it's still quite hard to tell where we're at, but it could turn out actually that we're losing jobs, that we've actually lost jobs since Liberation Day, which is a very, very unusual thing for an economy to do.

But let me

go one step deeper, Ben, I want to challenge you and literally everyone in the media to think a little harder about what economic things we should be looking at.

Here's what I mean.