Unfortunately, that figure never recovered from the pandemic. It also never recovered from a major drop after the 2008 recession.
It's pretty obvious the declining native born rate is just mirroring the overall decline in labor participation, probably from demographic changes. Old people retire and stop working, after all.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART
If you look at prime age labor force participation rate, it tells a completely different story:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
It's ironic that you talk of "ungameable statistics", implying that others are misleading people with the statistics, when you're seemingly trying to do the same thing by selectively presenting that statistic to imply that immigrants are stealing native-born's jobs.
* It would indicate more single income households able to make ends meet and live higher quality lives
* It would suggest more stay-at-home parents to rear children, which is only possible in a safe and stable economic environment
* It’d also suggest a higher amount of community engagement, rather than mere working and resting.
* A rise in successful single-income households would also suggest improvements in cost of living affordability
In our current world, where we expect both parents to work full-time jobs to survive (because the cost of everything assumes a married couple employed full-time, especially in cities), this number is bad; in a healthier society, it might be a good thing.
I’d argue in favor of deflating costs or raising wages instead of increasing labor force participation, but that’s my personal soapbox.
Edit: my CEO owns ~125 houses.
It's funny you bring that up, given the statistics on this shows that it's been trending down, but nowhere close to the amount you'd expect from the popular discourse.
Since, youth suicide, depression, anxiety, etc have hit record levels. Coincides with the smart phone adoption and negative emotion graphs.
The first stages of a worldwide recession is what it looks like to me.
How are the normal unemployment rates (U-3, U-6, etc.) "gamed" exactly? Or, put another way: what would you do differently?
https://www.lisep.org has alternate measures that try accounting for take home wages as well as seasonal variability (construction is noted as being volatile but relatively well paying).
That seems fine? It's the unemployment rate, after all, not "likes how much money they're making" rate.
Moreover if you compare these alternate measures, they more or less match the same trend as U-3. For instance:
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/alternative-...
So if the alternate measures mostly follow the same trend as U-3, and the numbers are only higher because they use a looser criteria, what's the point of bringing them up, other than as a cheap rhetorical device?
Suppose we had some way of objectively determining happiness on a 1-10 scale. The government puts out a metric called the "sad rate", which is people who are 2 or less on the scale. What's the point in coming along and declaring "the real sad rate is not actually 5%. If we change the cutoff to 3, it's actually 10%!"? Heck, why stop at 3? Why not declare everyone under 5 sad? Then the sad rate would be even bigger, great for doomposting!
Effectively they just take the official numbers and add a constant.
I suppose that makes me a second-class citizen?
Boris Johnson was born in New York. "He wasn't born in this country" probably wasn't even on anybody's top-100 problems with Boris as Prime Minister.
While the rules of being a natural born citizen is more complicated if born outside of the US, you can generally become one if one of your parents is a US citizen.
I can’t help but think talks of denaturalization are more than just fringe.
Or perhaps the numbers are starkly different, and for the best?
1. Kaiser Permanente healthcare strike sidelined 28,000 workers. The strike ended on February 23rd.
2. The severe weather resulting in two major snow storms made it so that lots of businesses were simply closed for a few days. This meant they couldn’t be properly surveyed.
It still is not good, but the magnitude of how not good is worsened by specific one-time circumstances. Make of that what you will.
I can’t see the FT article but this one. Talks a bit about these circumstances: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/06/february-2026-jobs-report.ht...
Not sure why this source was used. There are plenty of other sources that are more accessible/available (that are already shared and discussed here).
US economy unexpectedly sheds 92k jobs in February (bbc.com)
524 points | 23 hours ago | 733 comments
There's also a stagnation of salaries relative to inflation and a slow hiring market that has people locked into a job when they'd like to find something better. The K-shaped recoveries have people slipping out of the middle class. Combine with housing increasing faster than inflation, future generations having a lower quality of life than their parents.
The wealthy are doing what they can to try to direct the narrative elsewhere, by controlling media sources, blaming immigrants, blaming China, and blaming the government. But we really have far too much wealth concentration to be sustainable, not unlike the ending of a game of monopoly. If a more stable solution isn't found soon, I fear things will get much worse than they already are.
No job means no healthcare or reduced coverage for many people for example, so it is a bigger deal to have unemployment.
Which means a Finnish or Spanish level unemployment would be much more catastrophic, however anyone expecting the demise of USA will have to keep waiting as the country is very rich and developed and as a result they will re-group and be fine - eventually.
"gold standard"... according to whom? Economists? Internet commentators? White nationalists?
HN being a tech forum that now increasingly skews East and Midwest (heck, it's not even 7am yet in the West, but look at the degree of engagement on here) means most HNers are impacted by a slowdown in tech hiring, which exacerbates the sense of pessimism.
And tbf, if you aren't working in a tech hub like the Bay or NYC, you are going to be screwed if you are laid off - employers increasingly restrict remote work to those employees who have proven internal track records, and inshoring hubs like in RTP, Denver, Atlanta, etc are on the chopping block.
That being said, over my lifetime I've heard many TV talking heads, people I assume are much more well informed than me, claim that presidents don't really have that much to do with the state of the economy, despite the levers they pull, and it's all a matter of timing whether they reap the benefits of a good economy or get pummelled for a bad economy. That doesn't stop them from taking credit when things are good (or pretending that things are great with things are actually pretty meh).