Like 17-18%, would you say?
Lot of people stopped looking a long time ago
Most of the people I know 50 and up - if they lose their job they simply don’t think they’ll ever work again.
One woman I know is working two part time fast food jobs. She used to be an office manager. But she’s older, and after two + years she just gave up.
I did some research recently trying to ascertain what the current size of the workforce is. In the end, I used 156M. I was looking at how remarkably few individual taxpayers pay the bills. ~7.8M individuals pay 60% of the taxes!
Along the way I also learned that the current U3 unemployment rate is calculated using a "workforce" figure derived as "the number of people who have actively looked for work in the last 4 weeks." If the U3 unemployment was calculated as it was in 1992, today's unemployment would exceed 20%.
These numbers are so obfuscated and massaged, it is hard to find numbers you can have confidence in.