Our Coming Chronic Discouraged-Worker Epidemic: Friday Focus

This morning the BLS tells us that we had in November a civilian adult employment-to-population ratio at 58.6%, no better than in October 2009…

The civilian unemployment rate down to 7.0%, more than halfway back to its business-cycle peak value from the Lesser Depression nadir…

The labor force participation rate down to 63.0%–when demography tells us it would be 65.5% in a healthy economy…

The nightmare: that we will never get those 2.5% of adults who are the missing members of the labor force back into looking for jobs, and then into employment.

Can we get them back into the labor force? What would we have to do to get them back into the labor force?