Low US Labor force participation

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Yes, it's low for men of working age. Within the OECD, only Italy's scores lower. But why? Well, here are a couple of reasons:

A large share of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 who aren’t in the labor force may suffer from serious health conditions that are “a barrier to work” and suffer physical pain, sadness, and stress in their daily lives, according to research being presented next week by Princeton University labor economist Alan Krueger. “Nearly half of prime age NLF [not-in-the-labor-force] men take pain medication on a daily basis, and in two-thirds of cases, they take prescription pain medication,” according to Krueger’s paper, Where Have All the Workers Gone??

Why Are So Many Men Not Working? They’re in Pain - Bloomberg

In fact, this is corroborated by the increasing mortality rate for white males age 45-54, a unique American phenomenon. There seems indeed to be a good deal of white middle age male angst, although as this thread explains, trade isn't the big culprit

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Things will magically change come January 20, when the labor market will suddenly become great again

The idea that there are 95 million Americans who are out of work but not counted as unemployed. This statistic pervades the conservative discourse about our economy (or at least until Jan. 20). The implication of this statistic is that the government and media are lying to us. Instead of an economy that’s slowly improving as President Barack Obama has been telling us, our economy is actually a catastrophic failure, unable to provide any work for nearly 100 million people.

Our president-elect, Donald Trump, seems to believe this fake statistic. His newly named economic adviser, Gary Cohn, does too, as do many other Republican politicians. Even trained economists and well-respected market strategists use the 95 million figure as a short-hand way of saying the economy sucks, despite the 4.6% unemployment rate, or the 14 million people who’ve gotten a job over the past seven years as we crawled out of the Great Recession.

Google “95 million unemployed” and you’ll find that dozens of right-wing news sites regularly report on and comment on the fact that a record 95 million adults are not in the labor force. We’ve heard it over and over on Fox,CNBC,Breitbart,ZeroHedge, LifeZette,CNS News and many more. You’ll find it on MarketWatch, as well.

This is the perfect fake statistic, because it’s absolutely true. And completely meaningless..

No, Mr. Trump: The unemployment rate isn’t really 42%, and there aren’t 95 million people out of work


The vast majority of people who aren’t in the labor force don’t want or need a job, but don’t tell that to Donald Trump or the right-wing media.
As we consume more and more information through unfiltered internet sites and social-media networks, all of us have become more susceptible to getting fooled by propaganda, which is what people really mean when they talk about the problem of “fake news.”

Follow this fake statistic that the right wing used to trash Obama’s economic recovery - MarketWatch

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Trump's immigration and deportation policies are likely to reduce the growth of the labor force further and make an already tight labor market already tighter:

The effect of immigration on growth of the working age population is even more pronounced as immigrants are usually young relative to the aging domestic population (left panel of Exhibit 2). As a result, net immigration currently accounts for virtually all of the 0.5pp trend increase in the working age population. According to Census projections, the level of the US working age population would actually fall by about 0.2% per year in 2020-2030 in the absence of immigration (Exhibit 2, right panel). The tendency for immigrants to be younger is also reflected in labor force participation data as the participation rate of foreign-born individuals (65.9%) is a bit higher than that of their native-born counterparts (62.2%).

Snap AV: immigration and the US labour force | FT Alphaville

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And there is another, more sinister reason why the US labor force participation rates (LFPR) has declined and hence the slowing down in the growth of the labor force, the US incarcerates many more people than other advanced economies:

A single variable -- having a criminal record -- is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations.

5 Reasons Germany Isn't Suffering in the 21st Century - Bloomberg View

About 7 million American men of prime working age (25 through 54) are not in the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That means they don't have a paid job and haven't been actively looking for one.

This figure does not include those in jail or prison. It does include students and men staying home to take care of children or other family members -- but, as Nicholas Eberstadt estimates in his important new book, "Men Without Work," these two categories seem to account for less than 15 percent of what he calls the NILFs (for not in labor force). And the NILF share of the U.S. prime-age male population has been growing and growing.

Out of Prison, Out of Work - Bloomberg View

But actually it's not so much the people in prison (after all, the statistics don't include them in the labor force to start with), it's what happened afterwards, when they're released:

The percentage of NILFs has risen since the 1970s all over the developed world, which definitely fits with the technology-displacing-jobs explanation. But the trajectory has been much steeper in the U.S. than in other rich countries. Why is that? Eberstadt digs through the data and comes up with a surprisingly simple answer:

A single variable -- having a criminal record -- is a key missing piece in explaining why work rates and LFPRs [labor-force participation rates] have collapsed much more dramatically in America than other affluent Western societies over the past two generations. This single variable also helps explain why the collapse has been so much greater for American men than women and why it has been so much more dramatic for African American men and men with low educational attainment than for other prime-age men in the United States

It isn't that men in prison are dragging down the labor force participation rate -- as noted above, they're excluded from the calculation. But the great incarceration wave that began in the 1970s has produced millions of ex-convicts who are ill-prepared for jobs or are discriminated against by employers even when they are prepared. Eberstadt cites an unpublished study that estimates that 12 percent of the adult male civilian non-institutional population (that is, men not in jail) in the U.S. has been convicted of a felony, and figures the percentage must be even higher for prime-age men given that the "incarceration explosion" didn't start till the 1970s.[/font][/color]

This is on the one hand tragic: Millions of American men who were imprisoned in the 1970s through 1990s have been thrust into a labor market that really doesn't want them. On the other hand, it is at least potentially fixable.

Out of Prison, Out of Work - Bloomberg View