> The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have grown in lockstep Only the reporting has grown in lockstep. The metrics have chan

> The fact he wrote this 65 years ago yet the labor force and population have grown in lockstep Only the reporting has grown in lockstep. The metrics have changed to make this happen. Some of the real story can be seen in these graphs: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12026620 https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12026620 (you'll have to change the dates to get the full picture. Works with a POST so I can't link to it. Note that unemployment essentially is labour force - jobs. Hence, the weakest members of the jobs force are counted double. Also, discouraged workers are discounted (and the rules for discouraged workers means they are essentially anyone unemployed for more than some months). The real unemployment rate, discounting double jobs and including discouraged workers is somewhere between 9 and 16%) The short of it is that the job market froze, with a few bubbles in between, at around 1984-1987 or so, at an unemployment rate of around 8% or so and has been slowly but very steadily increasing since. Even the rate at which this is happening is increasing. The government, of course, has changed definitions again and again to show better numbers, but so far they don't go all out China on us (ie. the real data still appears to be published by the government, unlike in China where we know 15 million people were fired last year in several provinces due to protests and violence resulting from it, but this is not reported anywhere in government data) Granted, that's still not quite the story of Kurt Vonnegut, but keep in mind that we're about 30 years into a phase in history where jobs grow slightly slower than population growth. This could be accelerating, or it could simply be that under Obama there was no real jobs recovery despite "extraordinary measures" by the Fed.