The unemployment rate for prime age men (ages 25-54) is still relatively low, despite the recent upswing,. However, the percentage of non-employment (people who are either officially unemployed or not employed, but also not actively seeking work) among this group is near its post-war high, as Floyd Norris shows in his column today. For some reason, large numbers of prime age workers have simply dropped out of the labor force, presumably because of poor employment prospects. The situation is actually probably somewhat worse than the official data imply. There has been a big increase in the number of people who are not picked up in the Current Population Survey (CPS), the survey used to measure unemployment and employment rates. The people who are not picked up by this survey are from demographic groups, such as young African American men, that face higher rates of unemployment and lower rates of employment than the population as a whole. My colleague, John Schmitt, compared the CPS data with data on employment from the 2000 Census and found that the CPS may be overstating employment rates by about 1 percentage point for the population as a whole, and as much as 8 percentage points for young black men.
--Dean Baker
