this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2026
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You use the "people of working age looking for employment" metric because lumping in people who aren't of working age and aren't looking for employment gives you a population that isn't actually employable.
Right dude. I used to prepare these statistics. I'm not unemployable because I had a few sizeable chunks taken out of me, advanced degrees be damned, despite the views of a lot of employers.
It's technically my awful attitude but you know.
Right, but the larger point being made in the article is that the metric has become less useful over time. I was continuing to quote because you were taking it out of context.
As workforce participation ahas gone down. Many people are checking entirely out of the economy (no longer looking for work) or don't make enough to afford basic things like housing and healthcare. We literally have a class of working homeless people in this country. Those people are technically "employed".
Sure, they're called Retirees. And they're moving into retirement due to their advanced age. And we're seeing a glut of them due to the lopsided Boomer age cohort. But, among Millennials and Zoomers, workforce participation is above the historical average. Two-income housesholds are the modern norm. We are not in any kind of unemployment crisis. If anything, we're experiencing a labor shortage.
That's got nothing to do with workforce participation, either as a useful metric or a share of the population. Far more indicative of our abysmal housing policies and our atrocious criminal justice system.