Post 22

Mr. Campbell asked us to take three quizzes and write 15 facts that we've learned from them.

1) Unemployment rate is the most closely watched and highly publicized labor force statistic.

2) Marginally attacked workers are people who once held productive jobs but have given up looking for work.

3) Frictional unemployment is unemployment attributed to workers moving from one job to another.

4) Structural unemployment is unemployment that results from changes in technology or in the way the economy is structured.

5) Discouraged workers are people who want jobs but have stopped looking for work for job-related reasons.

6) A supply shock is an event that increases the cost of production for all or many firms.

7) To construct the consumer price index, the Bureau of Labor Statistics selects a sample of commonly purchased consumer items, called the market basket.

8) The worst degree of inflation is called hyperinflation.

9) Aggregate supply is the total amount of goods and services produced throughout the economy.

10) Economists use price indexes to calculate the inflation rate.

11) The income gap between the richest and the poorest Americans was wider in the 1990s than at any other time since World War II.

12) Poverty thresholds are adjusted annually based on changes in the consumer price index.

13) To measure the amount of inequality in the distribution of income, economists plot a Lorenz Curve.

14) The data used to plot a Lorenz Curve can also be used to compute the Gini Index.

15) One potential cause of the widening disparity in incomes in the United States is the increase in divorce rates and out-of-wedlock births.