And here is one for 55+yo: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11324230
All is fine
I know many ex-colleagues who have been retired early -- they face age discrimination and cannot find work.
Overall I can't imagine the killing all this head count cause blossomed too much and now AI definitely reducing head count futher is a good thing for an economy. An economy where these jobs let you buy nice single family homes in nice areas.
For me I havent left the job market but it's a huge joke now for techies and soon will be for a lot workers who use a computer to complete their work tasks. AI agents will be reducing all white collar jobs where only a few will be needed vs. 10 or 20 were needed before.
People at my work were talking poor of gen z and how they are bulk of neets and how they are lame and etc.
There is always some cringe in different generations apart, but even being older, I can empathise with them. You have zero forecast to buy a home for yourself, to buy a car, to even pay for a university. Whatever they want to do, they will be sucked dry, even if it is a video game.
The f our generation is doing. We are being evil towards the elderly and the young. We blame the rich, the game, the system. All of them we power of our utmost selfishness, transfering the guilty for someone like we couldn't do anything about it.
Previously I imagined only the top-top tier firms could enjoy low single-digit acceptance rate, but here we have Accenture crushing it. Competition must be tough.
(But for what I know, could be that AI has made it easier for people to spam everyone with applications)
They are being inundated with thousands of AI slop applications each week.
Hiring has devolved to word of mouth recommendations.
Pre-2008 retail was quiet in the middle of the day, now it booms. I can’t comment on if this is a good or bad thing, but I am surprised at how many people are causally walking their dog as I am rushing to compete an essential errand and get back to work.
Original headline: "Job seekers giving up: Labor force participation rate falls to lowest in 50 years, outside of the Covid era"
If you're playing labor in a capitalist society, you're playing a losing strategy.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
An aging population means 25-54 represent less workers and people "retiring" from the labor force before social security age is likely to be deeply negative for their finances into old age and not just a decision from the relative luxury of being able to select jobs with quick vesting pensions like in past decades.
If pension ages were going down over the years and the average worker were well vested by 55 then in that reality all would be fine.
It's great how two sources can tell a completely different story about the same numbers.
Edit: genuinely perplexed on the response. This saved my ass one winter when I had nothing for rent.
Worth noting this is people who have a job, it includes the under-employed.
I think you've got something wrong here, "millennials" refers to people currently between 30 and 45 and are surely the least likely to be discriminated based on either age or inexperience.
That should already make you skeptical, and after looking at the chart, I'm more on side "all is fine" than the doom narrative the article is pushing.
Networking turned from a suggestion into being the only way of getting hired. I don't need a job, but I've gotten several emails from recommendations and I didn't have any 3 years ago or so, maybe an odd one here and there.
I think getting scouted is also one of the better ways of getting hired by having an active github profile with at least one popular open-source project even if it is AI slop.
The effects of this change are definitely being felt, good and bad, in many countries already.
- People anticipating high interest and price hikes in a world where many products are very-slowly-depreciating assets, in the case of game consoles and RAM, even appreciating, and
- A low current of suicidality, with an ambivalent regard towards the prospect of death once the account reaches $0.
- Alternatively, unemployed people in our field often find themselves free from a noncompete to work on profitable projects during unemployment.
I work 8 AM - noon, 3 PM - 2 AM. (Exact ranges vary.)
I don't have an office and I've never met most of my coworkers.
I'm exceedingly angry that restaurants and stores are no longer open until midnight. I used to do 11 PM Target shopping, 2 AM Walmart shopping, etc. Nothing is open late anymore, and it sucks.
Especially concerning when a bunch of politicians were in on it, ensuring that the money went out willy-nilly and that $700+ billion in "loans" were turned into a straight up gift from the taxpayers.
https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/cre...
https://fortune.com/2020/07/08/ppp-loan-recipients-members-o...
What we've done to other countries has finally turned inwards. It was just a matter of time.
They're based in Ireland. There's like 42k software developers in the entire country* and Accenture has 779k staff**, so they had to hire people in foreign places like Norway and the USA.
* OK, it says "Computer Programming": https://enterprise.gov.ie/en/publications/publication-files/...
** and I have no idea how many of them do "Computer Programming"
At the gas stations I worked at, the shifts were 7AM-3PM, 3PM-11PM, and 11PM-7AM.
I used to do a lot of things at abnormal times. What does a quick beer after work look like when you're done at 7AM?
I also don't know many unemployed people cruising around malls looking for ways to spend money.
Wasn't that widely understood during the pandemic? All the coverage I've seen mentioned that the loans for forgivable if certain criteria were met, and nobody was like "yeah it's fine because it's a loan!".
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...
https://www.economist.com/content-assets/images/20260221_IRC...
Honestly, it probably comes down to more networking and credentials.
https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2012/01/13/the-shockingly-si...
And then these loans were just forgiven. And since they went to businesses, Republicans are completely silent about that.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paycheck_Protection_Program
“You deserve to starve instead!!” - is this really the position you want to argue?
Where is the connection between the percentage being graphed and whatever their definition of “stronger redistribution” is?
And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
The chart is supposed accompany an article, which explains what the metric is:
"""A simple measure of progressivity involves comparing the distribution of income both before and after tax. By this measure America redistributes about twice as much today as in the 1960s (see chart 1). Germany and Japan, the next biggest rich economies, also redistribute a lot more than they used to. So do Britain and Canada. Indeed by our estimate, seven in ten countries have more progressive tax-and-benefit systems than in 1990. The ones that have become less progressive tend to be dysfunctional (Belarus, Eritrea, Haiti) or were exceptionally redistributive to begin with (Norway, Sweden)."""
>And I just realized the second graph includes capital gains for the fiscal income but not for the after tax income? This just seems blatantly misleading with that detail being hidden in an asterisk.
1. If you read the original paper[1], they seem to be doing it for weird economics reasons:
"We then sequentially remove capital gains, which are not in national income"
I don't know enough about economics to dispute this, but given that they bothered to adjust for other factors like imputed rent and "corporation retained earnings", I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt unless there's convincing reason otherwise.
2. On page 16 they have an actual breakdown of all the adjustments, which lists the effect of removing capital gains at between 0.7% to 1.4%. In other words, not enough to change the conclusion.
[1] https://davidsplinter.com/AutenSplinter-Tax_Data_and_Inequal...
If you just do it yourself... there is no one to tax or take anything off the top. It often ends up you double your "income" from your work or better.
But wow, 98€ is about how much it takes for me to take my family out to lunch at a fast food restaurant.
There are _some_ decent Democrats in the Congress. There are also plenty of bad ones. There are NO decent Republicans in the Congress. And yes, reality appears to be partisan.
To the topic in question, PPP was not really a big deal. The real culprit is this: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CP - the corporate profits literally DOUBLED since 2020 because of earlier Trump's tax cuts.
the US seems much more speculation and leverage based, rather than capital being used by private owners to apply labour to to make useful goods
Not really. If you add data series for pre-tax profits and index both series to 2020, you see the two lines are basically on top of each other.
A now hiring sign is posted in the window of a Chipotle restaurant on June 5, 2026 in Los Angeles, California.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images
On the surface, a June drop in the unemployment rate helped provide some upside to what was an otherwise downbeat jobs report — but it was for all the wrong reasons.
That's because the decline in the jobless level to 4.2%, the lowest in a year, came largely from an exodus of workers from the labor force, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics data Thursday.
In fact, the measure of the working-age population either employed or looking for a job slid to 61.5%, the lowest since March 2021. Excluding the Covid-era jobs market, it was the lowest labor force participation rate in exactly 50 years.
The decline in the labor force marks a "massive exodus" driven by multiple factors, said Mike Reid, head of U.S. economics at RBC.
"The unemployment rate fell to 4.2% as both the number of unemployed workers and the size of the labor force pulled back," Reid wrote in a post-report commentary. "This may well be a story of retirements but could also be a story of prior job seekers dropping out of the labor force."
Within the bureau's household survey, where the participation numbers are drawn, is a story of a consistently contracting labor force potentially driven by unemployed workers simply giving up.
In June alone, the labor force, a measure of those either employed or not employed and looking for work, plummeted by 720,000. Similarly, the rolls of those counted as not in the labor force, a group that includes the unemployed and those not looking for work, jumped by 832,000.
And while the establishment survey, which counts jobs filled, showed growth for the month of 57,000, the survey of households, which counts the actual level of those working, tumbled by 507,000.
On a year-over-year basis, the labor force is down by just over 1 million, while the level of the employed also has fallen by 1.06 million and the ranks of the unemployed have risen by 40,000. The employment-to-population ratio slipped to 59% in June, the lowest since October 2021. All that has happened while the unemployment rate has risen by just one-tenth of a percentage point to 4.2%.
"What really affects me is not so much the unemployment rate," said Dan North, senior economist for North America at Allianz. "What's an important development is the participation rate, and this is a big leg down in one month, and over the past year it's a pretty big leg down. I think this is a more important number."
The drop in participation is sometimes attributed to a shrinking immigrant population and retiring baby boomers and Gen Xers.
However, in June the biggest plunge came from what is defined as "prime age" workers, or those between the ages of 25 and 54. That rate fell 0.6 percentage point to 83.3%, its lowest since December 2023.
"Looking at the statistics now, that argument doesn't hold up so well," North said of the retirement and immigration rationale. "I hate to use the word 'alarming,'" he added, but said the numbers are cause for concern.
To be sure, some economists said the June numbers seem out of sort. Specifically, they cited the large decline in leisure and hospitality workers as a sign that the data could be noisy.
But the participation numbers are part of a continuing trend.
"It was shocking to see 720,000 people stop looking for work entirely and the hospitality sector shed jobs," wrote Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union. "It's a better job market than a year ago, but opportunities are limited."
