> And this had a remarkable effect on wages, too.
Actually, on second look, my wage data look a bit screwy. You'd need to do custom-made analysis of the microdata to really do this right. Better to put it more simply, as Jared Bernstein of EPI does:
http://prospect.org/cs/articles?article=its_full_employment_stupid
> It's Full Employment, Stupid
> Even a slight rise in unemployment clobbers the bottom half.
> Jared Bernstein
> November 2002
>
> [...]
>
>> [In the full-employment years of the late 90's] Black and Hispanic
>> poverty fell 7 percentage points and 9 percentage points,
>> respectively, signaling historic lows in both cases, compared with a
>> 1 percentage point drop for whites. For young black children, poverty
>> fell more than 16 percentage points, by far the best performance
>> period since we've been tracking such data, implying that the gains
>> over this period were particularly important to low-income working
>> parents.