And from Felix Salmon:

For demographic reasons — the retirement of the baby boomers — the labor force participation rate is naturally going to fall over the next decade. But go back just one year, to March 2011, and look at the official CBO projection of the labor force participation rate. The CBO saw a rate of 64.6% in 2012 — a full percentage point higher than we're at right now. The participation rate wasn't expected to fall to today's level of 63.6% until 2017.

According to the Commerce Department, the median U.S. rent was $721 per month in the first quarter, up 5.6% from year-earlier levels.

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Between SpaceX's rendezvous with the ISS next month and today's announcement by Planetary Resources to mine asteroids and build space "gas stations," one might get the impression that the future is nearly here.

The vacancy rate fell to 4.9 percent in the first quarter from 6.2 percent a year earlier, the New York-based property-research company said in a report today. It was only the third time since Reis began gathering the data 31 years ago that the rate was less than 5 percent.

When vacancies drop below 5 percent, "effective rents tend to spike as landlords perceive that tight market conditions allow for greater pricing power," Reis said in the report.

The more the world relies on smart machines, the more domestic wage rates become irrelevant for export prowess. That will help the wealthier countries, most of all America. ... The less manufacturing has to do with labor costs and relative wage levels, the greater the comparative advantage of the United States.

National oil production, which declined steadily to 4.95 million barrels a day in 2008 from 9.6 million in 1970, has risen over the last four years to nearly 5.7 million barrels a day. The Energy Department projects that daily output could reach nearly seven million barrels by 2020.

The mini energy boom is creating a lot of jobs too.

March marks the start of the housing season. Prices peak in May, sales in June, and inventories in July. In colder regions, seasonal swings are bigger, and the market peaks later.

There seems to be something in the air. Within the last day or so, three ex-employees have written about why their feelings have changed about three formerly beloved companies.

The bursting of the housing bubble presents us with a good opportunity to re-examine the proposition that expensive houses are a good thing. Expensive land is, of course, a benefit to those who own it. But scarce -- and therefore expensive -- houses are a barrier to opportunity. In an economy where tradeable production can take place overseas, or increasingly be done by machines, access to the high-wage, high-productivity labor markets of America's richest cities is more important than ever.

The implication here is that higher home prices and rents prevent more people from living in highly productive economic regions (be it North Dakota or Manhattan). Home affordability is a benefit to the economy in the long run. Matt's book The Rent Is Too Damn High covers this topic in more detail.

It is this cumulative public divestment — and not extravagances like climbing walls or recreational centers advertised on a few elite campuses — that is primarily responsible for skyrocketing tuitions at state institutions, which enroll three out of every four college students.

Colleges have found ways to hold costs per student relatively steady. Since 1985, the average amount that public institutions spend on teaching each full-time student over the course of a year has barely budged, hovering around an inflation-adjusted $10,000, according to a State Higher Education Executive Officers report. But in the same period, the share of instruction costs paid for by actual tuition — not the sticker price, but the amount students actually pay after financial aid — has nearly doubled, to 40 percent from 23 percent.

This is an important point worth reiterating. Public colleges and universities have traditionally received significant funding from the state. While these colleges and universities have done a fair job of keeping their costs from increasing over the years, the funding they receive from the state has been significantly reduced. The only way to make up this shortfall is to raise tuition.

Is this what traditional lending standards look like or are we overcompensating after a period of loose standards?

Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke wondered as much during his testimony before the House financial services committee this morning. "There's a lot of concern about the tightness of mortgage standards, even when people qualify for GSEs," he said, referring to loans guaranteed by Fannie, Freddie and other government-sponsored enterprises.

Bernanke cited the Fed's recent white paper on housing that laid out the argument in greater detail, pointing out that tight standards have yet to unwind even for prime mortgages that are eligible for government guarantees. "The extraordinarily tight standards that currently prevail reflect, in part, obstacles that limit or prevent lending to creditworthy borrowers," the paper says. "Less than half of lenders are offering mortgages to borrowers with a FICO score of 620 and a down payment of 10 percent — even though these loans are within the GSE purchase parameters."

If we look at all stocks available in the market and sort these on the basis of their historical volatility levels, lower-volatility stocks have generated higher returns than higher-volatility stocks. If we sort using beta, (a standard proxy for risk) rather than volatility, the low-beta stocks have historically generated substantially higher returns than their high-beta counterparts. The outperformance provided by selectively building a portfolio out of low-beta/low-volatility stocks is on the order of 2.0% per year, as compared to buying a portfolio in a market-cap weighted index such as the S&P 500 Index.

But what should our pursuit of innovation actually accomplish? By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) "better, or cheaper, or both." Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense. One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society's wealth and well-being.

Increasing portions of the US economy appear to resemble the Hollywood winner takes all reward model. How do you manage a career with fewer safe bets employment-wise?

It's not clear what today's eager 23-year-old will do in 5 or 10 years when she decides that acting (or that accounting partnership) isn't going to work out after all. The best advice may be to accept that economic success in America will come as much from the labor lottery as from hard work and tenacity. The Oscars make clear that there is only so much room at the top. In a lottery-based economy, you need some luck, too; now, perhaps, more than ever. People should be prepared to enter a few different lotteries, because the new Plan B is just going to be another long shot in a different field.

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I think the advanced economies of the world fundamentally grow through technological progress, and as their rate of progress slows, they will have less growth. This creates incredible pressures on our political systems. I think the political system at its core works when it crafts compromises in which most people benefit most of the time. When there's no growth, politics becomes a zero-sum game in which there's a loser for every winner. Most of the losers will come to suspect that the winners are involved in some kind of racket. So I think there's a close link between technological deceleration and increasing cynicism and pessimism about politics and economics.

I'm not always a fan of Thiel's arguments, but there are a lot of insightful comments in this interview.

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Update: As CR notes, this large one month delta is in part due to population estimate adjustments made annually. With the population adjustment applied to the CPS employment numbers, the more accurate 1 month delta is 631K. Funny that the BLS doesn't revise prior numbers as they do with other series.

Over the last two years, the private sector grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, while the government shrank at an annual rate of 1.4 percent.

The combined result has been economic growth of 2.3 percent.

Catherine Rampell provides an excellent summary of Georgetown's Center on Education and the Workforce's new report called: Hard Times: Not all College Degrees are Created Equal. Unemployment rates and median income by major and levels of education and experience are below.