President Barack Obama waves after he urges Congress to act and extend emergency unemployment insurance benefits while at an event in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Jan. 7, 2014. (REUTERS/Larry Downing)

Nominally, as measured by the number of payroll jobs, the economy surpassed pre-recession employment in May 2014. However, the report notes, “the payroll job count deficit does not represent the total number of jobs needed to bring the economy back to pre-recession levels because the population and potential labor force have continued to grow.”

After including labor force growth, the report concludes that the current jobs gap is only about half what it was at its lowest point, in February 2010.

Because the labor force participation rate fell during the recession, the analysis uses employment-to-population ratiosknow, targeting partners, children or the elderly, mostly by poisoning or some other indirect method. In her engaging challenge to the essentialist line, When She Was Bad (1997), Patricia Pearson writes: ‘we tend… to peg women as afflicted and mentally ill, while understanding men as willful, immoral and antisocial’.

But is this right? And what does it tell us – since, in fact, insanity pleas are pretty rare, among men and women? In their 2013 survey of women and homicide, a team of psychiatrists led by Susan Friedman of Case Western Reserve University in Ohio quote an evidence-based study that shows fewer than 1 per cent of all defendants in US courts file an insanity plea in defence of a violent offence, while some who do act out of