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I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation" rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular topic, on
by techbio 10y ago
I would like to see a little more serious attention to the "participation" rates in the workforce. Author is a little too reliant, for this particular topic, on the 5% unemployment rate.
- rqebmm 10y agoThe recession certainly did a number on the participation rate, but the current rate is more or less organic (as evidenced by recent gains in wages once unemployment stabilized at ~5%). A lot of baby-boomers aged out around during the recession, and will continue to do so (people born between 1943-1951 all turned 65 during the recession), and a lot of people went back into school to "hide" from it. _Under_employment is still a serious issue, but that's only reflected in labor statistics by median wages. On the bright side those have been going up too, but aggregates only tell us so much.
- pessimizer 10y agoI don't know what "more or less organic" means here. Using the prime age (25-54) employment rate filters out that noise, and it shows that we've retraced about halfway from the worst of the housing crash. https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12300060 edit: ...which is really terrible if you look at it in the longer term: http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-ratio-remains-terribly-depressed/ http://www.epi.org/blog/prime-age-employment-to-population-r...