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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

The digit may sound stunning, and shocking, but it's not really that bad with a demographic profile of USA. USA is a relatively youthful nation.

https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/labor-force-partic...

Countries with older, more experienced workforce, usually have higher employment, and are less sensitive to shocks.

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data at the link you posted claims that Slovakia had a 94% labor participation in March 2020.

I find that very hard to believe.

It is a scraper, but in general they have data that makes sense.

What I like about them is their data is very up to date.

Data indeed is not reliable, growing up in that area, I can say Slovakia and Czech Republic have similar demographics and employment rates, while occupy very different places in the linked data source.

Here is a more reliable source from worldbank, claiming ~60% labor participation rate [1].

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.TLF.CACT.NE.ZS?locat...

Yea it's not useful. This could be the result of positive forces such as more kids going to university instead of entering the work force (improvement in educational attainment) and/or people able and choosing to retire earlier OR of very negative forces, as they seem to imply.

Rolling the statistics up to the population level is not the best way to look at this. They should have broken out the trends by age bracket. Pretty shoddy journalism.

Yes, less experienced workers, and workers from more liquid now industries (which also tend to be younger) are more expendable by the definition.

But youth unemployment still really sucks. Good first job is critical to success in life.

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