If you add up all the hours worked in the economy in June 2011 they are equal to all the hours worked in February of 1999. That’s how much slack there is in the economy.
First, we are going to pull a graph we haven’t used before, index of aggregate weekly hours (thanks to Lee Price for the suggestion). What’s this? From the BLS’s definition:
Indexes of aggregate weekly hours and payrolls. Indexes of aggregate weekly hours are calculated by dividing the current month’s aggregate hours by the average of the 12 monthly figures, for the base year. Indexes are based on 2007 averages for all employees and on 2002 averages for production and nonsupervisory employees. For basic industries, the hours aggregates are the product of average weekly hours and employment of workers to which the hours apply (all employees or production and nonsupervisory employees). At all higher levels of industry aggregation, hours aggregates are the sum of the component aggregates.
So you add up all the hours worked in the economy and plot them on a graph, divided by a previous year to set a baseline. So this is total hours, not hours per employee or anything like that. Total hours worked in the economy.
How does that look? Here’s the aggregate number of hours worked in the economy for the private sector:
Even though our population is larger, there are significantly fewer hours worked across all people in the economy. How does this look on a longer timeframe? This is the index of aggregate weekly hours for production and nonsupervisory employees for all private industries, which has a longer time series than other totals:
If you add up all the hours worked in the economy in June 2011 they are roughly equal to all the hours worked in February of 1999. Is there some sort of supply-side argument about how we are less productive as workers than we were in 1999 or 2004? This is part of what people mean when they say there’s unused capacity, and that’s a tremendous waste of people’s talents and lives.