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The US is already on a pretty pronounced decline in labor participation since about the late 90s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stloui

The US is already on a pretty pronounced decline in labor participation since about the late 90s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART This is already an order of magnitude lower than most other advanced economies. I think it's true that Americans work pretty hard, but when given the opportunity will rather work towards early retirement or enabling a spouse to not work than taking leisure. On the welfare front, there have also been huge expansions in the last few decades towards SSI and Disability payouts. It's not a UBI (since it's not Universal), but the future of the US would probably be an expansion of these existing programs to more or less provide the same results.

dragonwriter 2y ago
> The US is already on a pretty pronounced decline in labor participation since about the late 90s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART It's called the baby boomers aging and retiring (with a secondary factor of college participation going up): prime age labor force participation is very close to its all-time high [0], but the demographic bulge in (and moving farther into) the 55+ category drives the overall rate down, as, to a lesser extent, does college enrollment of people below prime age (<25) going up from the 1990s (peaking in the 2010s, but still above any time in the 1990s.) Overall labor force participation rate uses the entire 16-and-older population as the divisor, which is useful for some things, but ignoring age demographics leads people to draw all sorts of bad conclusions from changes in that measure that are unsupportable once you look at the prime-age segment. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
- legitster 2y ago
  That's good support for the thesis - the fact that so many people are choosing to defer working, or retiring early, is a good reminder that Americans are just sprinting through their careers. Especially if you compare the US internationally, the average American is such a laggard at working in comparison: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?most_rec.... So it must be true that Europeans either must work much longer careers, or have extremely high prime age participation for the numbers to make sense. And if you overlay labor force participation data with GDP per capita, it's kind of crazy the efficiency that the US generates economic productivity from our workforce.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > Especially if you compare the US internationally, the average American is such a laggard at working in comparison In your own link, the US rate is well ahead of the World rate, not a laggard. You probably made the mistake of comparing the World rate on that page (which tracks using the World Bank 15-64 working age population definition) with the US headline labor force participation rate (which uses the 16-and-over population as the denominator, not 15-64). But there is country information on the same World Bank page using consistent labor force definition for comparison to avoid that problem.

dragonwriter 2y ago

> The US is already on a pretty pronounced decline in labor participation since about the late 90s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART It's called the baby boomers aging and retiring (with a secondary factor of college participation going up): prime age labor force participation is very close to its all-time high [0], but the demographic bulge in (and moving farther into) the 55+ category drives the overall rate down, as, to a lesser extent, does college enrollment of people below prime age (<25) going up from the 1990s (peaking in the 2010s, but still above any time in the 1990s.) Overall labor force participation rate uses the entire 16-and-older population as the divisor, which is useful for some things, but ignoring age demographics leads people to draw all sorts of bad conclusions from changes in that measure that are unsupportable once you look at the prime-age segment. [0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060

legitster 2y ago
That's good support for the thesis - the fact that so many people are choosing to defer working, or retiring early, is a good reminder that Americans are just sprinting through their careers. Especially if you compare the US internationally, the average American is such a laggard at working in comparison: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?most_recent_value_desc=true https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.ACTI.ZS?most_rec.... So it must be true that Europeans either must work much longer careers, or have extremely high prime age participation for the numbers to make sense. And if you overlay labor force participation data with GDP per capita, it's kind of crazy the efficiency that the US generates economic productivity from our workforce.
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Especially if you compare the US internationally, the average American is such a laggard at working in comparison In your own link, the US rate is well ahead of the World rate, not a laggard. You probably made the mistake of comparing the World rate on that page (which tracks using the World Bank 15-64 working age population definition) with the US headline labor force participation rate (which uses the 16-and-over population as the denominator, not 15-64). But there is country information on the same World Bank page using consistent labor force definition for comparison to avoid that problem.