Too Many Americans Are Watching from the Sidelines

The post Too Many Americans Are Watching from the Sidelines appeared first on WhoWhatWhy.

This is the final part of a multi-part WhoWhatWhy election autopsy. Please go here for the first, second, third, and fourth parts.

Many of the macro trends playing out now have been decades in the making, like the uncoupling of productivity and higher wages. Since the 1970s, we saw productivity climb, even as wages declined relative to the cost of living. So, even as there was an exponential growth in productivity, workers and American households did not get a piece of the action.

As WhoWhatWhy reported for Labor Day, what workers got were ever-higher levels of household debt, which included exotic ways to borrow against the value of their home.

From the outside, it looked like the US was keeping up appearances, but the savings rate slid precipitously lower, and the household balance sheets of Americans more and more resembled the federal government’s — they were encumbered by debt.

The top line unemployment numbers are largely irrelevant to the reality on the ground. What should instead be in center focus is the labor force participation rate — the percentage of Americans working or actively looking for work. That rate has been declining for decades and even now hovers below 63%, hardly a passing grade.

There’s a hidden army of men ages 25 to 54 who are not in the workforce as chronicled in Nicholas Eberstadt’s seminal work “Men Without Work: America’s Invisible Crisis.” As Eberstadt recently observed on C-SPAN, Americans have “the most dismal record of the exit of men from the work force.”

Read more http://whowhatwhy.org/2016/11/25/many-americans-watching-sidelines/