Unit labor costs vs productivity — the soft-landing mechanism
The reading heterodox lens
The profession's models said disinflation required a sharp rise in unemployment. Instead, productivity growth and the easing of unit labor costs did the work. Read through real competition, this is the distributive split between labor and capital adjusting — not a stable trade-off being exploited.
Interpretation is labeled as interpretation. The underlying series are official BLS/BEA data (or, where noted, an explicitly constructed classification) and are downloadable below each chart and in the Explorer.