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"151 million Americans count themselves employed" Whoa - that would be 47% of the population? Or even higher if you only count percentage of population eligibl

• djur 10y ago
  67.4% of Americans aged 15-64, as of 2013. Working age population is around 200 million. There's still a decent number of single-earner married households out there -- roughly 25% of all married households. That accounts for some. 13.5% have no earner at all. That's mostly retired couples, but there's also some who are permanently disabled. Labor force participation rate has hovered in the mid-60% range for a long time -- it increased over most of the latter 20th century, plateaued in the '90s, and dropped a lot during the Great Recession. The main change is that the rate dropped a lot for men -- from 87% in 1948 to 69% in 2014 -- and women increased from 32% to 56%. (Yes, men are still over 10 percentage points more likely to be employed than women in the US.)
  • sievebrain 10y ago
    US Labor force participation drops during recessions, recovers afterwards, but never to the same rate as before the recession. Basically every recession removes some people from the working economy permanently.