Americans are increasingly foregoing paychecks due to disability, school or retirement< How come more people are retiring in their early 20s? Why are middle-age men becoming stay-at-home dads? What's keeping women out of the workforce other than illness, kids or school?
Those are some of the questions raised in a new Bureau of Labor Statistics report that shows changes over the past decade in why people stay out of the labor force. Finding answers is key for the Federal Reserve as it maps the contours of a job market that's becoming harder to predict with the aging of the baby boomers and shifting household priorities.
Here's what the bureau found, broadly: Thirty-five percent of the U.S. population wasn't in the labor force in 2014, up from 31.3 percent a decade earlier. (You're considered out of the workforce if you don't have a job and aren't looking for one. That's distinct from the official unemployment rate, which tracks those out of work who are actively job hunting.)
Drilling down into the numbers reveals more about the shifts in the reasons some people forego a paycheck. In all age groups, for instance, more people cited retirement as the reason for being out of the labor force, and it wasn't just older people.
For Americans between the ages of 20 and 24, the share of those sidelined over the past decade because they were in school increased, unsurprisingly, during the decade that included the Great Recession. What's more unusual is that the share of 20- to 24-year-olds who say they're retired doubled from 2004 to 2014.
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