The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413</a>.<p>Unfortunately, that figure never recovered from the pandemic. It also never recovered from a major drop after the 2008 recession.
>The ungameable statistic is the native born labor force participation rate, which also ticked down: <a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNU01373413</a>.<p>It's pretty obvious the declining <i>native born</i> rate is just mirroring the overall decline in labor participation, probably from demographic changes. Old people retire and stop working, after all.<p><a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART</a><p>If you look at prime age labor force participation rate, it tells a completely different story:<p><a href="https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060" rel="nofollow">https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060</a><p>It's ironic that you talk of "ungameable statistics", implying that others are misleading people with the statistics, when you're seemingly trying to do the same thing by selectively presenting that statistic to imply that immigrants are stealing native-born's jobs.
Hot take, but I don’t think it should recover. If anything, I think a combination of low unemployment, higher wages, and a labor force participation rate of ~45-55% would be a sweet spot to aim for:<p>* It would indicate more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives<p>* It would suggest more stay-at-home parents to rear children, which is only possible in a safe and stable economic environment<p>* It’d also suggest a higher amount of community engagement, rather than mere working and resting.<p>* A rise in successful single-income households would also suggest improvements in cost of living affordability<p>In our current world, where we expect both parents to work full-time jobs to survive (because the cost of everything assumes a married couple employed full-time, especially in cities), this number is bad; in a healthier society, it might be a good thing.<p>I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
A lot of things unraveled around 2012.<p><a href="https://wtfhappened2012.com" rel="nofollow">https://wtfhappened2012.com</a>
The iphone + fb/instagram = kids spending more time on the screen than irl<p>Since, youth suicide, depression, anxiety, etc have hit record levels. Coincides with the smart phone adoption and negative emotion graphs.
I love how Covid lockdowns clearly show up in so many graphs going across the past few decades. It's going to be a real gem for researchers in general going forward.
Isn’t that a proxy for aging and lower birth rates?
> The ungameable statistic<p>How are the normal unemployment rates (U-3, U-6, etc.) "gamed" exactly? Or, put another way: what would you do differently?
U-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like.<p><a href="https://www.lisep.org" rel="nofollow">https://www.lisep.org</a> has alternate measures that try accounting for take home wages as well as seasonal variability (construction is noted as being volatile but relatively well paying).
>U-3 Unemployment doesn't include people not actively looking for work, people making less than they'd like, or working less than they'd like.<p>That seems fine? It's the unemployment rate, after all, not "likes how much money they're making" rate.<p>Moreover if you compare these alternate measures, they more or less match the same trend as U-3. For instance:<p><a href="https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-measures-of-labor-underutilization.htm" rel="nofollow">https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...</a><p>So if the alternate measures mostly follow the same trend as U-3, and the numbers are only higher because they use a looser criteria, what's the point of bringing them up, other than as a cheap rhetorical device?<p>Suppose we had some way of objectively determining happiness on a 1-10 scale. The government puts out a metric called the "sad rate", which is people who are 2 or less on the scale. What's the point in coming along and declaring "the real sad rate is not actually 5%. If we change the cutoff to 3, it's actually 10%!"? Heck, why stop at 3? Why not declare everyone under 5 sad? Then the sad rate would be even bigger, great for doomposting!
The graph ("vs. Headline Rate")[0] follows the same trend lines as the BLS numbers just with a higher percentage. I don't see how the "poverty wage" methodology (which is arbitrary) is helpful here, it doesn't take into account caregivers or disabled people who may be keeping their wage low on purpose due to benefits cliffs.<p>Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant.<p>0: <a href="https://www.lisep.org/tru" rel="nofollow">https://www.lisep.org/tru</a>
Is this working age population or all ages ?
That seems to be everyone above 16 years of age.
It excludes inmates, that is penal and mental institutions (which in the land of the free is surprisingly sizeable chunk).
Also excludes active military personnel.
Notably it includes people who are disabled but are unable to work.
It is a historical range of working age, so it includes people who are 16 and over and everyone until the die of old age.
I’m naturalized—very, very long term—but I couldn’t find any stats that track by US citizens.<p>I suppose that makes me a second-class citizen?
You have one right fewer than natively born Americans - you can't become the President. Make of that what you will.
I don’t mind it. Learned about it in elementary. But not stat tracking citizenship employment seems like a blind spot?
This is another one of the weird American-isms that many Americans don't realise isn't normal everywhere else.<p>Boris Johnson was born in New York. "He wasn't born in this country" probably wasn't even on anybody's top-100 problems with Boris as Prime Minister.
The US president is both Head of State and Head of Government. It turns out there's a bunch of countries that require the head of state to be a natural born citizen: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidential_qualifications_by_country" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidential_qualifica...</a>
The requirements to be US President isn't to be born in the US, but to be a "natural born citizen."<p>While the rules of being a natural born citizen is more complicated if born outside of the US, you can generally become one if one of your parents is a US citizen.
I wouldn't call it an Americanism, per se. There are plenty of countries where you can't become a citizen at all without having a relative who is one. There are also plenty of countries where, even being born there is not sufficient for citizenship (in fact, only 35 countries in the world grant citizenship unconditionally via being born within the borders).
Didn't stop Barrack Obama..
It means that if we cut off or discourage immigration, we can’t count on non-native citizens to continue boosting our numbers. So, we have to look at the native-born stats to get an idea of our future.
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As the population continues to age, and more people are 62+, this is expected...
I don’t think that’s telling the whole story.<p>Immigration has always been used as leverage against the native workers, and now it’s more efficiently corrupt than ever.
Look at that trajectory one more time and tell me how 'expected' it is.<p>The first stages of a worldwide recession is what it looks like to me.