 So the definition of full employment can get a little technical, but the stakes are really high. Basically, every percentage point we managed to push down the overall unemployment rate, we're talking about one and a half million workers who have jobs, and we're talking about tens of millions of workers who can get larger wage increases than they would have otherwise had, or can get full-time work, but they can only get part-time work before, or just get more hours on the job. So this really matters. When economists talk about full employment, they don't mean no unemployment exists at all. They do mean that no unemployment exists simply because there's not enough spending in the economy. There's lots of reasons why unemployment can happen. You could even have the case where there's enough jobs to soak up all available workers, but some friction is getting in the way between the jobs and the workers. Maybe the workers live in the center of the city, the jobs are in the suburbs, and transportation is lousy. Maybe employers are racist and the workers without jobs are people of color. That kind of unemployment needs to be attacked with one set of tools. Full employment means, though, making sure no unemployment exists simply because there's not enough spending going on in the economy. That kind of unemployment is really damaging, but it's also really easy to solve. Part of the problem with defining full employment, because it's not 0% unemployment, I don't think that can ever be reached, is we don't know what it is before we actually reach it. The signal that you see in the data that says you're at full employment is that you start to see across the board wage growth. Basically, until you have enough spending in the economy to soak up idled workers, people who've been thrown off the job during a recession or during a downturn, workers just have no leverage to get wage increases out of employers. Basically, wage increases happen when workers are scarce relative to the jobs out there. Until you solve the problem of unemployment that exists because spending is too low, you're not going to create scarcity in the labor market. That's why wages can't grow, so when people say, when have we reached full employment? I can't tell you the exact number beforehand. I can only tell you we're at full employment when wages actually start to rise. Full employment really matters for most of the workforce. Really, I'd say the bottom 80% of the workforce needs to get to genuine full employment before it sees decent wage growth. But it does have particular importance and provides particular benefits to both low wage workers and workers of color. And this is because low wage workers and workers of color, they traditionally have very few other sources of leverage in the labor market besides those short periods of time when unemployment is really, really low. I mean, if you think about the institutions that we've actually created to give workers some bargaining power, unions, they've been under attack for decades. We have the federal minimum wage to protect low wage workers. Its purchasing power has just been battered for decades. Really, you look at this group of workers and they only have the prospect of really tight labor markets in order to give them economic leverage against employers. And you see it clear as day in the data. When you look at whose wages respond most robustly to declines in the unemployment rate, it's low wage workers and it's workers of color. Full employment can also help reduce labor market discrimination. And I think the dynamic is pretty easy to identify. Say you're an employer and say you have a job opening and you have 100 applicants for it. And say you're an employer who would prefer to discriminate. You want to hire only workers who look like you. That's pretty inexpensive to do when you've got 100 applicants to choose from. Instead, if you only have two applicants or even one applicant for every job opening, applicants who are qualified, you have to take those applicants who are qualified and it becomes much more expensive to engage in discriminatory hiring practices. And so full employment is essentially a way to make sure that employers are forced into hiring the best person available rather than the best person available who happens to look like them. And that can go a long way in reducing labor market discrimination. Today the economy is pretty much headed to full employment on its own momentum. And so the real pressing policy prescription is just don't stop that. If you think about the institution that could stop it, it's the Federal Reserve. And the Fed essentially balances two things. On the one hand, it wants to keep unemployment low so people have a chance of getting a job. On the other hand, it wants to keep inflation low and keep that from getting out of control. They think if spending starts rising too fast, that'll translate into excess inflation. And so the tool they use to restrain that is interest rate increases. When they raise interest rates, the cost of borrowing money to buy a home or buy a car or a washing machine increases, people do less spending. And so that's what the Fed is really trying to do, balance the benefits of low unemployment versus the benefits of keeping inflation firmly in check. For most of the past couple of decades though, they have radically overestimated the benefits of keeping inflation very low and really underestimated the benefits of keeping unemployment very low. And so they've been too cautious in terms of how low they're willing to tolerate unemployment getting. And that excess unemployment that we've had as a result has been a prime reason why wage growth for most workers has been so hard to get. You'd think everybody would be in favor of getting unemployment as low as possible, but that's not quite right. So the optimal rate of unemployment is actually a little different for workers versus employers. If you think about an employer, they don't want unemployment really high. They don't want to live in a recession. They want customers coming in the door. They want enough people with spending power to buy their goods. So they want unemployment low, but they don't want it too low because when unemployment gets too low, workers start to get a lot of leverage and they use that leverage to get wage increases and that can eat into profit margins. And so the optimal rate of unemployment for workers is really low to give them leverage against their employers and get them some wage increases. The optimal rate for employers is a little higher. So low enough to make sure customers keep coming in the door, but not so low that their workers are empowered to get really big wage increases out of them. So you've got that sort of conflict of interest between employers and workers. And then you've got the other angle that the financial sector really hates unexpected inflation. And it hates unexpected inflation mostly because unexpected inflation degrades the value of the assets that the financial sector holds. Given that finance is a very influential voice in the workings of the Federal Reserve, that means you've got this powerful voice that hates inflation making decisions all the time. The evidence is clear. We are not at full employment yet. And we know that because we have not seen the kind of healthy across-the-board wage growth that is supposed to be the clear data signal that we've actually gotten there. When we get this healthy across-the-board wage growth, then we can declare that mission is accomplished in achieving full employment, but not before.