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Glad you got the StLouis Fed graph.

2000 (when you see the labor participation rate start to go down) minus 65 equals 935; which is about a decade before the birth of the first cohort of “baby boomers”. By 2010, the beginning of retirements of baby boomers is in full swing.

But 2000-2001 - which is when the labor participation rate starts to decline after a more than three decade rise, represents more than just the cusp of the baby boomers retirements.

2000-2001 included a recession that actually started before GWBush took office. It also represents the period of dot.com and tech stock market busts.

But in spite of the over valued tech stocks, the basis of their rise - what technology could do - was not lost on ANY industry. The 2000s represented the start of the “gig” economy as well as very rapid advancement of “labor” saving and even job destroying uses of technology. It is the period that is part of a phase we are still in - jobs that disappear never to be seen again. It began earlier actually but the 2000s is when it really started to get traction. The current tech industrial revolution making its first big waves.

Baby boomer retirements have another decade to go, and the disappearance of jobs is still going on.

Part of the problem with the labor participation rate is we have too many folks who were never prepared for the loss of the only job they had ever known, many for as much as 20 or 30 years. And even though not ready yet for social security, they are not finding great alternatives to what had sustained them for years.

I can’t say what exactly many of such folks are doing today. I can only say I see them all over our society - broken families, working moms with non-working husbands, homeless, rising use of “disability” in all its forms, cash economy. living with friends and even back living with elderly parents, and increased rates of addiction. The by far largest demographic cohort of folks with some kind of addiction problem are not the youth, but folks from 26 to 65, and alcoholism is the largest of them. Among them men outnumber women almost 2 to 1. For whatever reason such folks have gotten to that status, many of them, and particularly the men (who have seen more occupations of theirs gone forever compared to women) are part of those no longer in the count of what makes up the labor participation rate.

I am not excusing anyone for anything. I am just making some observations.