America’s Missing Workers

Ben Casselman looks at how the labor force participation rate has changed over time:

The recession and weak recovery have led millions of jobless Americans to give up looking for work, meaning they no longer count as part of the labor force.

He calculates that 2 to 4 million of these workers could return:

A sufficiently strong economic recovery today could repeat the 1990s magic, drawing back all the missing workers, even the ones on disability. But there is also a more troubling possibility: If the recovery remains weak, people we now expect to return to the labor force will instead drift further away. More of them will go on disability, or retire, or otherwise drop out. The pool of 2 to 4 million workers who are still reachable by economic policy will eventually become unreachable, and the decline in the labor force will at last be permanent.