What Happened To U.S. Workers?

Cardiff Garcia

April 23, 2019 / 12:16 pm

Cardiff Garcia from The Indicator hosted a panel with Caroline Freund from the World Bank and Chad Bown from the Peterson Institute at a live recording in D.C. on April 11, 2019.

The U.S. economy is booming. We've seen sustained low unemployment rates, wages are climbing, and thousands of new jobs being added to the economy every month. The headline numbers focusing on the labor market seem great, and they are.

And yet, some deep problems remain unsolved. For example, take the prime-age labor force participation rate — or the share of people in the workforce aged 25-54, whom you'd expect to be working rather than in school or retired. In the U.S., that share is lower than it was in the 1990s. Why do so many workers remain outside the labor force? What economic forces have led to their exclusion from the rising prosperity of the U.S. economy?

This episode is an excerpt from a panel discussion at a live event in Washington D.C., hosted by the Financial Times Alphachat podcast.

Listen to the full panel below:

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