The Economy

BTW, you can drive a truck between a 4.6 percent unemployment rate and a 25 percent unemployment rate.

The point I am trying to get to is that Williams isn't just some knucklehead pulling numbers out of his ass. He largely is just using the exact methodologies the government used to use to calculate things like inflation, unemployment and GDP before they started changing their methodologies over and over again in more and more deceptive ways (a lot of this since the 1990s) because those numbers are politicized instruments. People should keep that in mind when the BLS is telling everyone that we are at near full employment. ... when the labor force participation rate is down near 60 percent and has been steadily dropping for decades.

The reality is that there are tens of millions of people collecting more in government transfer payments than they would earn in a lower-wage job, so they have dropped out of the workforce, pretty much permanently. And they simply don't get counted with the way they calculate that number. So yeah, in that paradigm, we are at full employment. But as we continue down the path we have put ourselves on, the labor force participation rate continues to drop, the unemployment numbers paint a false picture of a vibrant economy that more than half the population doesn't see. ... and it is getting more and more farcical, which is why I said at this pace, they will have to tell us soon that the unemployment rate is negative.

 

That just isn't reality if you look at the aggregate information available. In the aggregate, people are working much longer in the than they did a generation ago. ... in part because they are living longer so the work age has extended, but also in large part because for every person who is looking at a comfortable retirement at 67 today there are a lot more who don't have enough in savings.

 

BTW, it's pretty funny you posted that because the one place that the labor force participation has been growing over time has been for older Americans. It's why it was noticeable during the pandemic when there were a lot of people deciding to retire, as that trend reversed itself for the first time in a very long time.