As of April 2019, only 3.6 percent of adults in the US labor force were unemployed, as defined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s the lowest rate America has experienced since 1969. An unemployment rate that low is supposed to augur disaster, if you listened to many macroeconomists — and indeed, many Federal Reserve officials responsible for managing employment in the US — over the past few years. Mainstream macroeconomics uses a concept called the non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment, or NAIRU. NAIRU, a term introduced by Milton Friedman in 1968, is supposed to represent the minimum level of ... (full story)