Depressing Graph of the Day: The Quasi-Beveridge Curve

The Beveridge Curve plots the unemployment rate against the vacancy rate--the ratio of vacancies to the labor force. This quasi-Beveridge Curve plots the employment-to-adult population ratio against the vacancies-to-adult-population ratio:

If you think that "full employment" in the United States today is a vacancies-to-adult-population ratio of no more than two percent, and if you think that each percentage-point rise in the vacancy rate going forward will be associated with a no more than 5 percentage-point rise in the employment-to-population ratio, then…

The headroom for demand expansion without inflation is now down to 2.25% of the adult population on the employment-to-population ratio: "full employment" is now an employment-to-population ratio of 60.8%.

2.25% of the adult population is still 5.5 million workers: we could still put 5.5 million more people to work with appropriate demand-management policies.

But restoring the employment-to-population ratio to 63%? Boosting American employment by 10.7 million to get us back to the--completely sustainable--employment-to-population ratio of the pre-crisis era?

I look at this graph and I do not see how it can be done, absent truly massive and successful public active labor market policies to better match workers to jobs…