Unemployment rate.

If people told you in 2019 that we would have a pandemic like we did, would you have predicted unemployment would be below 4% in 2024?

I still don't think people consider the counterfactuals enough when they talk about these things.

For some context, at the beginning of the Great Recession in December 2007 unemployment was 5%, which is higher than it is now (3.9%).

4 years after the Great Recession began, unemployment was still at 8.5%. It had reached a peak of 10% in October 2009.

It would take until September 2015 to return to 5%.

It would get below what it is now for the first time on May 2018.

During the pandemic, unemployment would reach a peak of 14.8% on April 2020. It would get below 5% by September 2021.

It has been below 4% for almost two and a half years.