Fewer Americans are working don’t blame immigrants or food stamps
Where did all the jobs go? Well, we’re finally starting to find some satisfactory answers to the granddaddy of all economic questions.
The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 - amounting to about 6.8 million fewer workers in 2016.
Between 50 and 70 percent of that decline probably was due to an aging population. Explaining the remainder has been the inspiration for much of the economic research published after the Great Recession.
Economists and politicians have pointed at immigration, China, video games, robots, opioids, universities, working spouses - everything up to and including the academic equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and muttering, “Kids these days.”
Until recently, there was no good system to untangle it all.
University of ...