The Jobless

Via Paul Krugman, a chart and article by Floyd Norris contrasting the long-term trend in the unemployment rate (up and down) with the long-term trend in the proportion of prime-age men who don't have jobs (up and up). Naturally, this raises the question of what everyone's doing. One assumes that some portion of this is men taking on traditionally female roles as the personal primarily responsible for family care tasks. It also is my impression that there are more over-25 students than there used to be (certainly I know more than one person who was or is in law school at age 26 or higher). And the average age of retirement has tended to drop over time, so that must mean more men in their early fifties retiring.

On the other hand, for an older person the line between retirement and unemployment can be a fine one -- there are doubtless various retired people out there who would, in fact, be willing to work if there were more appealing job opportunities out there. But those kinds of thing aside, maybe there's been an increase in the number of people doing black market work at least part time? One trouble with official statistics is that trends are always ambiguous between whether or not something is actually not happening, or whether it's just not getting counted. Even during the very tight labor market of the 1990s, the jobless rate was way higher than it was in 1960 and it's a bit hard to believe that all those people were just doing nothing, and while the run-up since then very plausibly represents deteriorating labor market conditions, the job market was extremely strong back then.