Last week, the employment news was all about how payrolls increased by 269,000 jobs and blew past expectations. Yet, when we looked at the actual number of employed persons, it turned out that the number of employed people has gone down in recent months. At 158.4 million, total employment is still nearly 400,000 workers below where it was before the Covid Panic of 2020. Those who support the everything-is-great narrative have responded to the unimpressive employed-workers numbers by dismissing them as a result of workers retiring and other demographic changes. These explanations, however, require that we ignore the fact that millions of men age 25-54— that is, men of working age—have removed themselves from the workforce. When so many men—men who would have been in the workforce 20 or 30 years ago—aren't even trying to get a job, this lowers the unemployment rate and makes total jobs numbers look more impressive.
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