Economy & Policy

Another (sobering) slice of the jobs data

By Justin Fox | December 7, 2009 | +

Here’s a pretty depressing picture, courtesy of the Bureau of Labor Statistics:

This means that, as of November, 19.4% of American men in their prime working years didn’t have jobs. By this measure, the current job situation (for men, at least) is much, much worse than in any downturn since the BLS started measuring this stuff in 1948. Either that or there are just a lot more stay-at-home dads, grad students, and men who voluntarily spend their days playing golf or pinochle. But I think it’s mostly the former.

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  • norcalwingman

    So how does this compare to the ladies? Is that chart an analogue or is it trending up a bit?

  • http://twitter.com/foxjust Justin Fox

    Big-time uptrend through the late 1990s, pretty flat from then through mid-2008, marked drop since then. The employment-population ratio in November for women 25-54 was 55.3%.

  • http://www.124monkeys.com Sean DeCoursey forgot his password

    Does this include people in prison? Because that would totally skew the data towards male unemployment, given that the vast majority of people in prison are men in their prime working years.

  • http://twitter.com/foxjust Justin Fox

    Prisoners are definitely part of the 19.4% without jobs. But the total prison and jail population as of 2008 was 2.3 million, up from 500,000 in 1980. That only accounts for a small part of the decrease in the employment-to-population ration for that group.

  • dotybj

    …waiting for the women’s rights people to spin this as a “success.”

  • tanboontee

    Are we not like the blind touching and feeling the different parts of a gigantic elephant and interpret its appearance in our own peculiar way?

    Bombarded by all the numbers and percentages obtained from myriad perspectives, how many of us could still claim to be not confused?

    Who decides the definition of unemployment? And what exactly is it?

  • bnorthlich

    I can’t find the graphic on the BLS website. Can you/someone supply a ref? Thanks

  • http://twitter.com/foxjust Justin Fox

    I downloaded the numbers and made the graphic myself (well, Excel did). I thought it was impossible to link directly to the source, but I may be wrong about that. Try this:
    http://data.bls.gov/PDQ/servlet/SurveyOutputServlet;jsessionid=a230bf31375231702c29

    If that doesn’t work just go to
    http://www.bls.gov/data/#unemployment

    and use the one-screen data search function

  • bnorthlich

    Thanks vmuch. No luck. I’ll try harder later. Lots ‘o data at the old BLS…

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    [...] one out of five American men in their prime working years don’t have jobs. That’s the highest rate since World War II. In the current recession, our nation has lost more than eight million jobs, or [...]

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