Good News! Work Force Still Shrinking

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Ed Morrissey at Hot Air describes the November jobs report:

The economy added 146,000 jobs, better than expected if still a status quo result, and the jobless rate declined to 7.7%. . . .
However, the seasonally-adjusted labor force dropped by 350,000, and the civilian labor force participation rate also dropped two-tenths of a point to 63.6%, almost at the 31-year low hit in August. . . .
In other words, America isn’t going back to work. Americans are still dropping out of the work force.

This statistical illusion — having the unemployment rate decline because the people stop looking for work — cannot be maintained infinitely. Economic reality is like gravity, and is impossible to avoid.

UPDATE: Bill McBride at Calculated Risk has a bunch of charts and stuff, in case you require detailed data to know the economy sucks.

 


9 comments

  1. Your rich uncle will find a way to describe these most downtrodden of the downtrodden as “retired”…at least that’s my cynical suspicion.

  4. Everyone seems to use the same language to describe those who “dropped out of the workforce”. And that is the say they have “stopped looking for work” I general neither of those two quotes are accurate. These are people who have exhausted their unemployment benefits, and have stopped communicating with the federal government. Hundreds of thousands don’t “give up” every week, they just stopped getting the checks.
    They are mostly still looking, or working under the table. It’s just that the State and media can pretend that these vast multitudes do not exist.

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