August 22, 2015
In his two months as a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump has said many things that are racist, sexist, or otherwise offensive, but that doesn’t mean that everything he says is off the mark. The Wall Street Journal took Trump to task yesterday for dismissing the relatively low official unemployment rate and instead focusing on the large number of people who are not working.
While the WSJ is right that the vast majority of people who are not working are people who chose not to work. These are older people who are retired, young people who are still in school, or people who are taking time out of the labor force to care for children or other family members.
Nonetheless, even if we control for changes in demographics there has been a sharp decline in the employment rate of prime-age workers (ages 25-54) from the pre-recession level. The employment rate of prime age workers is still down by almost three percentage points from its pre-recession level and almost four percentage points from its peak in 2000.
While many analysts try to explain this falloff with vigorous hand waving, it is almost certainly due primarily to the weakness of the labor market. It is implausible that millions of prime-age workers suddenly decided that they don’t feel like working. Trump is right to call attention to the drop off in employment, even if he is wrong to be worried that our grandparents or teenage children aren’t working.
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