November 4, 2018
NO ONE MISSES WORK:
The Myth of a 'Tight Labor Market' (Andrew L. Yarrow, August 31, 2018, RCB)
The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), which sorely needs some new terminology to describe the state of the U.S. workforce, counts only those who have looked for a job within the last four weeks as unemployed. Less noticed are its counts of how many Americans are "participating" in the labor force by working or being "unemployed" as a proportion of the entire "working age" population. Unfortunately, BLS seems stuck in a long-ago world where "prime working age" is still defined as between 25 and 54 years old.The reality is that millions of us older than 54 work or seek jobs, and a fair number of Americans under 25 also work. If one expands the "prime working age" to age 64, about 18 percent of prime working age men are not in the labor force.There are further problems with this number: 64 doesn't even bring us up to full Social Security retirement age (and many work longer); it fails to include the nation's two million incarcerated men, the at least 10-15 million men who work part-time or in the gig economy -- often not by choice -- and men like a once high-earning 60-year-old New Yorker who said: "I retired after failing to find a suitable opportunity." Also uncounted are the several million males between 16 and 24 called "NEETS" (not in education, employment, or training).Cutting these numbers another way, millennial men's labor force participation rate is about 15 percentage points lower than that of 45-to-54-year-old men. Many, if not most of America's 17-20 million male ex-felons don't work. Despite the political focus on the Trumpian white working class, Millennials, those who have done time, and men higher up the socioeconomic ladder are also among what I call "men out."We're left with the reality that the percentage of men not employed today is about three times what it was during the Truman and Eisenhower eras: well over 20 million men. Not the four million officially deemed to be unemployed.
The other myth is that labor force participation is too low, when the fact is that it remains at unsustainably high levels historically. The heights were reached by simply adding women and minorities to the force without removing any white men for perfectly good political reasons. But economic forces always trump political and now white men have to compete for those jobs, so the rate is returning to historical norms and technology stands to drive the rate far lower.
Posted by Orrin Judd at November 4, 2018 4:32 AM