EPOP Goes the Weasel?

Conventional wisdom has it that our current biggest economic problem — nagging high unemployment — began, starting in 2007, with the Great Recession, and that everything was rosy before that.

Trouble is, that's not quite the whole story. This chart from The Washington Post shows why:

Today, according to the "epop" statistics, only 66.7 of every 100 Americans of working age have jobs. For women, the figure is 62 percent; for men, 71.4 percent. But overall employment and that for each of the two sexes taken individually used to be significantly higher, reaching a peak in the total population in the year 2000.

An accompanying story by The Post's Peter Whoriskey can be read here.

Notice that the percentage of working-age men that are actually employed has been trending downward since at least 1970, according to the graph, while "epop" for women was trending upward prior to the general downturn in 2000.

Here's a longer-term look at the men's ratio, taken from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) here:

(Click to enlarge.)

And the longer-term women's ratio, from here:

(Click to enlarge.)

From as far back as the start of the post-WWII era, in about the year of my own birth, 1947, to the start of the present century, employment among men has trended downward while that among women has trended upward. But since 2000, employment among both sexes has been heading downward, and the Great Recession has only exacerbated the problem.

I think we all need to keep these "epop" trends in mind as we debate what to do about the high unemployment rates that nag us today.