Hours Worked by Women Age 55 to 61 Confound Labor Market Analysis

Wouldn't the leading order effect be the time-lag of the increase in employment for 25-54yo women?

In the year 2000, the employment rate for the 55-64 group matched the 1970 employment rate for the 25-54 group.

"The share of available time devoted to work is the LIUR, calculated as the total number of hours that the working-age population (16 years of age and older) was actually at work relative to discretionary hours—100 hours a week on average per working-age individual—that that population could have devoted to work.(3) The numerator—hours at work—excludes hours paid while on vacation or on various leaves that do not contribute any labor input to the production process."

"3) This number of hours of time available to work per week for each member of the working-age population has been conventionally adopted in the literature by rounding up the figures documented in “Response to a Skeptic,” by Edward C. Prescott, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis Quarterly Review, Fall 1986."

"4) Notice also that, by construction, the labor input utilization rate (LIUR) overcomes one of the limitations of another commonly used labor market indicator, the employment/working-age population ratio, which measures the number of workers on payroll, regardless of the number of hours they are at work. This alternative indicator could provide the false impression of a tighter labor market in circumstances in which two or more part-time workers have replaced several full-time workers, even if the total number of hours worked remained unchanged."

From:

https://www.dallasfed.org/~/media/documents/research/eclett/...

And from my perspective, it's quite weird indicator.

We have been. Real (inflation adjusted) median household income has been going up in recent years, from ~$57k / household in 2014 to ~$63k / household in 2018:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N/

By itself the metric seems pointless. For anyone looking at it. Participation does not imply utility or value - wartime nations would present extreme LIURs but building bombs doesn't translate into economic prosperity. Likewise, if people aren't working because there is no work to be done or because they value their non-GDP-influencing activities by choice that is only a good thing.

It looks like the kind of metric a C level fawns over to masquerade what looks like productivity when it doesn't actually have to be.

True, it completely fails to pay any bills, but depending on what you do, you might get some everyday benefits out of it and it's a lot less annoying and exhausting than many jobs you could do elsewhere. Plus, nobody bats an eye if you decide to go from one volunteering gig to another after a few months, after all you're doing it for free. Switching jobs is more of a hassle.

As far as I can see, this kind of working hours isn't accounted for in these charts and I see that group as prime candidates for deciding that none-paying but nice, meaningful work is better than pushing numbers for another few years when you could make do without it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It's at it's highest level since 2007.

That said: can you elaborate on how the discouraged workers metric is racist?

Also, do note that this article uses labor input utilization rate, which has nothing to do with the unemployment measurements you're referring to.

That would show up in the statistics as mass unemployment and total economic collapse.

You can argue that U3 is not that informative of course. Especially since the labour structure is changing (much more casual work, "gig economy" effects) and that therefore a particular U3 over time doesn't mean the same in terms of people's lives. To argue, though, that it gets "re-defined and manipulated" simply isn't true.

The UK has “record low unemployment”, but very low productivity and a lot of homelessness and poverty. From personal experience it seems pretty clear that the explanation is mostly that the unemployment rate is far far higher than stated. But the stats are so meaningless and fudged that you can’t show it.

Much harder to fake a list of employed people and say “look at all these jobs” than to provide a list of “unemployed people” with the assumption that everyone off the list is not unemployed...

It allows the comparison of "labor structure", how national economies tend to behave in that regard. It shows correlation with socio-economical policies, e.g. from the more 'socialistic' regimes to the more 'individualistic' ones.

For instance you'd find that Germany and France have implemented vastly different economic structure since the turn of the century, and the German way consistently produced ~1% more growth with half the average unemployment rates; however productivity isn't higher (France is a weird champion at that), so for all its choice to massively reduce working hours comparatively to other countries, as well as de facto institute massive unemployement (about twice as much as comparable economies), France isn't losing too much on the comparative front — what it does to its population is another matter though, as the French show up as one of the most depressed and most pessimistic country on Earth.

So these numbers are like relative fiat money to me; the actual face value means nothing, what matters is how they fare between each other, and what economic policy underpins each currency. I could take physics analogies of "relativity" but I guess the word alone is enough in that field.

I suppose the 'rich account' of labor structure above, from sophistication to hours passing by morale and national policy/strategy is also enough to read that no, no "KPI" will cut it if we are to discuss complex matters. I'm sometimes appaled that we take very specific studies and then paint a whole world by deduction, without context, as it ever got us anywhere. Perception and opinion at its worst.

This is typically the age when women become grandmothers, and, unless they were highly paid in their professional life, the babysitting will typically be more valuable too.

This range is also Special in another way, because 401k and IRAs don't kick in until exactly 59.5 years, at which the LIUR of this cohort likely drops dramatically and may account for muddying up the data or not adhering to the trend.

I think it’s more likely that a lot of women in this age group suddenly lost their jobs in the Great Recession and never recovered.

When I worked in a social services agency in the early 2000s, this was one of the growth demographics for food stamps and Medicaid enrollment.