High anxiety.(in Americans )

WE live in strange economic times. We are in the midst of a lengthy economic boom, unemployment is low, and GDP growth in the first quarter of this year was likely more than 5 percent. The latest Federal Reserve data suggest that factories are the busiest they have been in over five years.

But the polls tell us that Americans are anxious. Overall, people think things in the U.S. are going in the wrong direction. According to a recent poll, more people think the economy is doing very badly than very well, and a majority of respondents disapprove of President Bush's handling of the economy.

Why the anxiety? A widely held view is that globalization has led to a world of high turnover. In the past, the story goes, employers cared about their workers and gave them jobs for life. Today, job security is lower, and workers are nervous.

This "changing world" story was introduced into the public consciousness by President Clinton, but has been echoed by virtually everyone since. In his speech at the 2004 Republican convention, Bush said, "The times in which we live and work are changing dramatically. The worker of our parents' generation typically had one job, one skill, one career, often with one company that provided health care and a pension.... Today, workers change jobs, even careers many times during their lives."

But are things really changing so much? The accompanying chart shows the percentage of the workforce that flows into and out of unemployment in a given month. Back in 1976, when Jimmy Carter was president, about 3 percent of the workforce entered unemployment in a typical month, and about the same percentage exited unemployment. After surging in the early 1980s, these numbers have declined steadily. Today, the flows into and out of unemployment in a typical month are less than half their rates of the early 1980s.

So job security has not dropped off the face of the earth. Indeed, it probably has improved, at least according to a thorough analysis of the data done recently by Steven J. Davis, R. Jason Faberman, and John Haltiwanger. Their paper shows that many ...