The media is citing the unemployment figure going down because more people are leaving the labor market. However I was actually quite shocked at the drop in male labor force participation since the 1950's.
I'm sure it has nothing to do with industry being outlawed by the EPA or the rise of the make-work-social-worker-puppiesnunicorns-government jobs.
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Can you break out your stats along racial lines? I bet you that a certain amount of the decline of in male participation is due to a precipitous decline in the black male participation rate.
I'd be willing to bet that any graph that ran two time series, one with respect to participation rate/income/employment of black men, and another on growth in government/welfare/etc, you'd have an almost directly proportionate inverse relationship.
They have it on the FRED database, but I don't think you'll see as much of a precipitous drop due to minorities dropping out simply because statistically, they are in the minority, and so numerically they won't pull the overall average down.
http://breweryadventures.com/blog/october-14-homebrew-legal-carter
Maybe this is why men are leaving the workforce? Unrelated, but is this enough to declare Carter's presidency a success?
I have been thinking about this for a while now. I believe that we are in the midst of a long term adjustment which may go on for another 50 years or more. Similar to the way the industrial revolution forced a change to the 40 hour work week, the entrance of women into the labor market is causing a huge adjustment in supply and demand. The labor pool has essentially doubled, yet the demand for goods and services has not; long term this means that the value of labor must decrease.
Could some of the decline be due to longer life spans and thus more retirees, or do the numbers only count workers below a certain age?
I believe it is the percent of people between 16-64 that choose to work. So retirees would not be included in that. Men are working less. Not that they have a choice. Very few of us have our "masters in social work."
With the massive increase in government, you have more government employees that retire at 55.
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