[servantboy777]

I guess i’m just ignert this way, but if we have roughly 330 million citizens in the U.S. and 95 million working age folks are out of the workforce...how is it the unemployment rate is 4.7%? Even if you take 50% of the rough math out of the equation and call it “margin of error”, how is it that we have 4.7% unemployment? With the margin of error, separating out this hokey group and that, would we not still see something around 17%?

[riverdawg]

There are not 95 million “working-age” people who are out of the labor force. There are 95 million persons age 16+ not in institutions who are out of the labor force. Most of these 95 million are retired and over 65, full-time students, homemakers, etc. The BLS website provides enough information formyounto perform the relevant calculations from the “raw” data.