What where historic influences on US unemployment rate from 1949 to 2014?

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All of those correspond to oil production peaks or problems in various oil producers.

In the 50s there was the ramp up and ramp down from Korea, and Suez crisis. Then Iraq problems in 1959. These all correspond to oil supply problems.

70s had various oil problems.

90s was Soviet collapse.

2000s was Saudi peak. And so on

Physics explains everything, other explanations are made up.

Upvote:2

I'm going to preface this by saying that I don't know German, so I can't go double-check exactly what those terms mean to verify that its being portrayed right (both by you and the authors), as I would normally like to do before answering something like this.

61-63 was not during the Vietnam war. At least not the US's involvement in it. That didn't really get going in a demographically visible way until the late 1960's and early 1970's.

However, 1962 is significant as the year the Baby Boomers started entering the workforce. In theory, this would create a sudden shock to the labor market, as there'd suddenly be a far larger supply of labor than there was in previous years, fighting for presumably roughly the same number of jobs. One would expect an "unemployment to population ratio" to show that.

1990 is a pretty close date to the end of the Cold War. This coincided with a scale-down of military spending in the US, but its possible the rest of the economy absorbed that. It was also (since I'm being generational) the year Generation X (the post-population boom generation) started entering the workforce. Which might have produced the opposite effect that you saw in 1962.

Here's a graph of the US fertility rate. Rotate that forward about 15ish years to when those babies start to enter the labor market, and you can see where that huge pulse of people might have affected the labor market coming and going.*

enter image description here

SOURCE: CDC/NCHS, National Vital Statistics System.

1990 was also the serious beginning of the computerization of the American office. During this period US productivity growth was running quite high, which effectively allowed companies to grow more without having to actually add jobs. This era ended around 2007, its often theorized because that's when US companies became pretty much fully computerized. Productivity growth since then has sunk back to the pre-1990 growth.

enter image description here

* - The Boomers are now starting to retire from the workforce, which is also likely to have some kind of labor market affect.

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