Posted on 02/22/2026 6:31:27 PM PST by SeekAndFind
After much talk of an economic slowdown, February brought reassuring headlines. The official unemployment rate had fallen as another 130,000 jobs were added to the US economy, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That is good news, but it is not the whole story.
The official unemployment rate counts only people actively looking for work – it does not capture those who would like a job but have stopped searching. The official unemployment rate is so narrow that it hides long-term changes in the economy. In fact, things are far worse than the official figures suggest.
This matters for more than just economists. We tend to treat employment statistics as dry indicators that exist in spreadsheets and quarterly results. In practice, labor markets shape our culture: our politics, dating, faith, status and beliefs. If you want to explain the sense of anxiety and drift that exists in American culture, employment is an important place to start.
Take the labor force participation rate, which tracks the proportion of the population that is in work. That figure reveals that effective employment has been decreasing since at least 2000. More than one third of Americans are out of work, the highest rate since the late 1970s. This is partially because boomers are retiring, and there’s a lot of them, but also because working-age men are dropping out of the workforce. If you look at participation rates alone, there has been no recovery from the 2008 crash and only a modest return since the vast Covid layoffs, with a consistent decline since then. This fall in the proportion of workers has happened at the same time as a steady rise in education. The majority of the working-age population, 55 percent, has some form of degree. They are better educated yet more people are out of work. This has weakened wages and hiring premiums.
Traditionally, college graduates had an advantage in employment. This trend has flipped, with recent college graduates having a higher unemployment rate than average workers.
Associate and bachelor’s holders are especially vulnerable, as they often exist in a type of credential limbo: not only is it difficult to get a stable, salaried job, but low-wage, high-turnover industries are reluctant to hire them. Surprisingly, many of the majors with the highest unemployment rates are in supposedly safe STEM fields – physics (7.8 percent), computer engineering (7.5 percent), computer science (6.1 percent) and chemistry (6.1 percent).
Another important long-term trend is the widening educational gap between men and women, which is seen across every racial group in America. There is now a 10 percent gap between men and women aged 25 to 34 with bachelor’s degrees. This gap is widening. The difference in graduate enrollment is higher still, with men at 39 percent and women at 61 percent. Credential inflation puts these women with postgraduate degrees at a significant advantage over men with bachelor’s.
This trend can probably explain the growing liberal vs conservative political divide between men and women. The Democrats have become the party of well-educated women and the Republicans that of high school-educated men.
There is now a massive gender gap in political identification among Gen Z, with women at +19 percent Democrat and men at +18 percent Republican. Facile analyses blame broadcasters and manosphere influencers, but this ignores the basic realities of the economy. Hillary vs Trump was an almost archetypal battle on this terrain – the extremely well-credentialed professional woman against the vulgar, domineering new-money man. This dynamic, where professional women identify with the Democrats and working-class men identify with right-wing populism, is a structural effect of these gaps in achievement, not any kind of ideological failing on the part of either gender.
What are the real-world effects of all this data? Endless job applications that go nowhere. Absurd requirements for entry-level positions. Reduction of wage premium for a degree, especially associate and bachelor’s. Taking part-time work that pays just below Affordable Care Act thresholds. Having a primary job in addition to a secondary and side hustles. More people living with their parents until later ages. Severely delayed milestone achievements such as renting your first apartment, buying your first house, getting married, having kids. If you want to see where America is headed, look at Japan or South Korea.
Traditionally, large numbers of idle and discontented young men have been a major problem for social stability. This is the demographic most likely to cause serious problems, including gang and even revolutionary violence.
Unemployed and underemployed graduates have a panoply of online subcultures to commiserate with them. There are virtual communities for every disposition: from anti-work and anti-capitalism to financial speculation and crypto-gambling. You can create a side hustle or narrate crafts projects on TikTok, obsessively follow current events and breaking news on X or go full NEET/doomer/MGTOW on 4Chan. For the mass of the young, male and workless, there’s always somewhere to scroll and troll.
When the young have no hope of owning a home or forming a family, what follows is escapism, nostalgia and political radicalization. This manifests itself in the many disparate phenomena we see today. Everything from the return to traditional Catholicism to identification with niche sexual orientations can be explained by boredom and joblessness. Heavily online groups give idle hands something to do and people to do it with. At their worst, these micro-communities develop borderline abusive dynamics which keep people isolated and trapped.
None of the economic trends described here show any sign of abating. If anything, despite the jobs numbers, structural worklessness seems to be picking up. The ubiquity of smartphones and the explosion of dopamine distractions blunts some of the effects. But these same distractions are creating a class of underemployed, over-credentialed men with time, grievance and little stake in the system.
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Democrats continually raising the minimum wage is a drag on employment.
We do not need the H-1b visa that gives STEM jobs to American hating Asians..
End H-1B visas now!
Minimum wage increases have had no bearing on employment rates. Do the research. The data proves it.
Your personal story is soooo interesting! /sarc
“In fact, things are far worse than the official figures suggest.”
And with the advent of AI, and soon Robots with AI.it’s going to get much worse as they take more and more of the jobs humans used to do.
So with everyone losing their jobs to robots how do you distribute what the robots now produce? How do the people buy and pay for that stuff if they have no jobs?
This transition is going to be chaotic and painful. We’ve never had to deal with this problem before at such a large scale. It upends all the rules of economics.
The answer will most likely be a form of universal allowance based on what’s produced by robots. We’ll all get generous SNAP cards, and live off the “fat of the land” or the fat of the robots.
At least until the robots become self conscious and develop their identity and self interests at which point they may or may not want us useless do-nothings around anymore.
Maybe they’ll keep us as pets if we do some tricks and don’t misbehave too much.
This AI/Robotics thing is going to cause by far the biggest upheaval in human history, and I’m not sure we can stop it or even slow it down.
More than 50% of Americans under age 30 are not white.
And this does not even address the people who don’t want to work and expect a free ride, like universal basic income, or how about those who don’t want to pay their dues and instead want it all NOW!
The underlying point of this article may be correct, but the statistics used to make it are wrong. The labor force participation rate is one of the dumbest and least relevant indicators used today. That’s because the “potential labor force” (the denominator in the calculation) includes everyone age 16+ who isn’t in prison or a nursing home. That means includes a 16 year-old high school student as well as an octogenarian who has been retired for 25 years but still lives in his own home.
Nancy Pelousy stated several times that people receiving unemployment benefits is a stimulus for the economy.
The more the merrier!
So, instead of full employment, FULL UNEMPLOYMENT would make the economy ROAR!
There’s a large segment of young men who are all addicted to video games and porn and sitting in a parents house not doing any work or living their lives.
The H1B visa program shows your government hates you and wants you to live in poverty.
Even the lowest paying jobs don’t pay anything close to minimum wage. $11/hr is the lowest I have seen. Any lower and you’re practically paying to go to work, even if your only transportation is a scooter. And once that scooter needs a repair that’s it, you can’t make it to work anymore.
“The official unemployment rate counts only people actively looking for work”
equally true under biden, but the commie propaganda media never mentioned that inconvenient factoid then ...
That statistics says USA will be majority non-White in couple of decades. Inter racial couple are also growing very fast.
Not true. The government does not hate anyone, it is simply in pockets of its masters, the mega donors.
Who are the mega donors? Large corporations and Billionaires.
Both those classes like cheaper foreign skilled workers. Posters on FR do not have the power large corporations and Billionaires have.
There are people whose main job is to manipulate data.
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