A new White House Council of Economic Advisors report outlines the decline in the Labor Force Participation rate over the last seven years in the US, parsing the more then 3 percentage point decline in overall participation rates. The last few years have seen big changes, attributed to aging of the population (1.6 percentage points); cyclicality (0.5 percentage points); and a pretty large residual (1 percentage point), likely the result of pre-Great recession trends and the “severity of the Great Recession.” You can read more for details, but this graph of historical trends caught my eye. Look at the decline in Male LFP over the past 65 years!
h/t @JustinWolfers
ERIN K. FLETCHER 