Perplexingly, the percentage of Americans who either had jobs or were looking for one (known in the parlance as the “labor force participation rate”) continued its steady drop, descending to levels not seen since the late 1970s. A big portion of this decline can be traced to an aging society (52%), and a smaller slice to the economic downturn (14%). But, according to the Council of Economic Advisers, the cause of some of the shrinkage (34%) is still unexplained.Note: I added the parenthetic percentages to aging, downturn, and unexplained. The article shows them graphically rather than in the text.
What we do know is that among so-called prime age workers between the ages of 25 and 54, the United States in 2014 had a lower percentage of men in the labor force than France and many other countries and about the same percentage of women working or looking for work as Japan, a country hardly thought of as a bastion of female employment opportunity. Among other consequences, the contracting labor force understates our unemployment rate.
Whoever assembled these figures at Bureau of Labor Statistics had to willfully omit the enormous increase in those drawing "disability" payments which explains how a non-trivial number of people are able to drop out of the workforce. Disability is only one of several programs which enable those leaving the workforce to subsist on what is, effectively, welfare. If we were less generous, more folks would bestir themselves to work.
