Why 3.5 million Americans in their prime years aren’t working — and no, it’s not video games

Thanks for posting this. Other factors are ancillary. Missing from the study, as reported here, is consideration of the ratio of disability payments or welfare benefits to minimum wage. This affects incentives to earnestly seek employment at low wages, forcing wages higher indirectly.

The MMT (Modern Money Theory) Economists have suggested a mechanism that gets rid of official unemployment and eliminates the need for a minimum wage. See for example the papers of Randall Wray, Univ. of Missouri economist, or Australian Economist, William Mitchell's papers and You Tube presentations. MMT is a school of economics that while representing a minority viewpoint in Economics is growing in influence.
https://www.google.com/search?q=william+mitchell+economist&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1
https://www.google.com/search?q=randall+wray&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1
 
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Men in their prime working years have left the labor force at an astonishing rate and they may never return if the state of the U.S. job market holds, according to a new reportfrom the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City.

A decline in demand for middle-skilled work -- a phenomenon dubbed “job polarization,” because more positions are concentrated at the higher and lower ends -- has played a role in keeping prime-age men out of the job market, Didem Tuzemen, an economist at the Kansas City Fed, wrote in the paper released this week. Without job polarization, Tuzemen estimated that 1.9 million more prime-age men would have been employed in 2016.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...-never-return-to-u-s-workforce-fed-paper-says
 
Too bad a lot of those middle-skilled workers are not Economists - the Fed is the world's number employer of them and can always use more spitting out useless studies to justify their (The Fed) existence.
 
Employment trends in the UK have been pulling in opposing directions for some years now if you would naturally wish to be employed in this middle sector. My experience is mostly public sector. Firstly, educational requirements for applicants in this tier have been increasing to the point where many demand a degree or degree-level qualification (in any subject). Secondly, autonomy within the middle tier job roles themselves has been progressively reduced, allowing whole cadres of posts to be downgraded to a lower salary.

Result is if I went back into a middle-tier post in the public sector I would have to work harder than I used to in that tier, at a job creamed of its satisfying features, under tighter supervision and for less money.

Why should I bother?
 
SunTrader said:
Too bad a lot of those middle-skilled workers are not Economists - the Fed is the world's number employer of them and can always use more spitting out useless studies to justify their (The Fed) existence.
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Can you provide a link to one of those studies, just one? Pretty much every rational person in the world grasps the reason for the Fed's existence, we're not going to waste money doing more to convince the "audit the fed" fringe who by and large aren't capable of reading an academic study anyway. Could be the economists at the Fed are doing their fricking job, which is why we don't live in the 1800s any more!
 
Sig said:
Can you provide a link to one of those studies, just one? Pretty much every rational person in the world grasps the reason for the Fed's existence, we're not going to waste money doing more to convince the "audit the fed" fringe who by and large aren't capable of reading an academic study anyway. Could be the economists at the Fed are doing their fricking job, which is why we don't live in the 1800s any more!
More...
Educate yourself.

Here is a good place to start:-

Fed Up by Danielle DiMartino Booth (2017) who worked many years at the Dallas Fed as advisor to that branch's President Richard Fisher.

They do the best job of printing green pieces of paper in the world. Not much else.
 
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