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Open thread June 2, 2017

Dan Crawford | June 2, 2017 9:51 am

Comments (7) | Digg Facebook Twitter |
7 Comments
  • Arne says:
    June 2, 2017 at 10:21 am

    Unemployment is down because labor participation is down. In a month when job growth is still exceeding the rate needed to meet the increasing population, why are so many people dropping out?

  • bkrasting says:
    June 2, 2017 at 11:26 am

    Arne – excellent question – Why are so many people dropping out?

    In May the number of people who dropped out of the workforce totaled a whopping 608,000. The total that have dropped out is now at 94.98 million.

    WTF?

  • J.Goodwin says:
    June 2, 2017 at 11:47 am

    Was it really 608 or was it an annual pace of 608. I haven’t looked, honest question.

  • bkrasting says:
    June 2, 2017 at 1:48 pm

    J.G. It was the monthly change. The number of people not in the labor force soared to 94.983 million, up from 94.375 million in April.

    There is a lot of statistical noise in the monthly numbers. But there is something here that is significant.

  • Dan Crawford says:
    June 2, 2017 at 3:24 pm

    http://cepr.net/blogs/cepr-blog/job-growth-slows-sharply-in-may dean baker

  • Arne says:
    June 2, 2017 at 4:30 pm

    Dean Baker has more detail here:
    http://cepr.net/data-bytes/jobs-bytes/jobs-2017-06

    I thought maybe people deciding now was a good time to retire, but Dean says “the drop in employment was among prime-age workers…”

    It seems to me that low wages must be the answer, but that seems inconsistent with data finally showing wage increases.

  • Warren says:
    June 3, 2017 at 5:16 pm

    One possible explanation is that when both husband and wife are unemployed, they are both looking for work. When the husband finds a job, the wife stops looking, and so drops out of the labor force.

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