Over at the Washington Post, Heather Long says, "If we avoid a recession, we can thank Black and Hispanic workers." I was all set to scoff, but she's right. Here's the basic employment pictire:
White workers have only barely recovered their pre-pandemic employment levels while nonwhite workers are all 10-13% higher. But a better metric of work might be the labor force participation rate, which is the percentage of the potential labor force that's actually working. Here it is:
White workers have a lower participation rate than they had before the pandemic. Nonwhite workers have 1-4% higher rates. On an absolute level, whites now have the lowest participation rate of any demographic group.
I don't really know what to make of this. Ideas?
There are lots of ways that these data invite speculation, but willingness to work by any kind of people has nothing to do with recessions. Recessions are usually caused by collapse of financial over-extension, typically over-leverage, or by ridiculous elevation of interest rates by the Fed. At times in the past post-war contraction was responsible. Recessions happen when there is insufficient investment.
People will work a job for wages that are not sufficient to support their family or even themselves (many at the lower end have multiple jobs). If employers are not getting enough job applicants, they are not offering high enough wages. People simply do not choose to be unemployed in any significant numbers if they are below retirement age (i.e. when they can draw retirement income of some kind).
And by the way, productivity has nothing to do with willingness to work or even worker skill - like recessions, it is determined by level of investment.
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They are getting old and quitting? I’m getting closer…
Early "retirement". They may not take Social Security early, and may have COBRA or go on an Obamacare plan.
Are they older? More white retirees? Perhaps having better jobs with more money for decades provided for higher savings rates / pensions / 401Ks / larger SSI checks, and makes it financially feasible to leave the workforce?
Age is my first guess.
Adjust for age.
The only POSSIBLE explanation is that these statistics are WOKE, which means they can be ignored entirely.
My guess is where they live. Perhaps a higher percentage of Asian and Hispanic workers live in counties where the economy is booming (tech counties, southwest and Texas, urban counties) while counties with significant percentages of white folks may be struggling (rural communities especially in the south, etc.).
Maybe this Brookings report can provide some enlightenment? Haven't had a lot of time to dig in: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/metro-monitor-2023-examining-pandemic-era-patterns-of-inclusive-growth-across-the-u-s/
And here's a Wikipedia page on demographics of Asian Americans. Cross referencing those two seems to show why Asian Americans are doing well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Asian_Americans
Age probably has something to do with it, as the participation rate of those over 55 dropped in the pandemic and never recovered. The BLS has no "prime age" classification so it's not clear what groups Kevin is talking about. It might be necessary to look at the detailed breakdowns by age and race.
No time to work when you have to go to all those MAGA rallies.
Bingo!
This is why the MAGAwhite wing calls all those people of color "lazy", "parasitical", "on welfare", yada yada yada. It's projection.
Simple. Hospitality hiring is way up. Who works in hospitality?
Affirmative action? All the employers are saving the jobs for minority applicants only?
/s but I fully expect this “reasoning” to appear on Fox News if this race gap persists.
Shrug?
White people are richer on average, so more can afford to retire early. Also, old people skew white, so that just adds to it.
Let's say there's this group of older white males (and to a lesser extent, older white females) who embraced a leader whose words were...stupid.
These people were directed to avoid masks during a pandemic and use alternative means to resolve an infection caused by the pandemic, then suffered disabling post-infection, life-altering problems.
¯\(°_o)/¯
Perhaps in part because as a group approaches full employment, it's hard to go much lower? Economists say full employment is when 97% of people in the labor market are either employed or currently looking for jobs.
In June 2023, per the BLS, unemployment rates were:
Whites -- 3.1 percent
Blacks -- 6.0 percent
Asians -- 3.2 percent
Hispanics -- 4.3 percent
“On an absolute level, whites now have the lowest participation rate of any demographic”
Males:
Hispanic 73%
White 68%
Black 62%
Females:
Black 58%
Hispanic 56%
White 55%
So you *could* say, if so inclined, that the high rate of Hispanic Male labor force participation (LFPR) was lowered by Hispanic Women, and that the relatively high LFPR for White Men was lowered by White Women (the lowest across all groups/genders)… while Black Women raised up the overall African American rate.
Or in the Washington Post’s framing, “If we end up in a recession, we can thank White Women for it.” … but that would be weird.
https://www.dol.gov/agencies/wb/data/latest-annual-data/labor-force-participation-rates
In my state, the number of home-schooled children has more than doubled from before the pandemic.
I am going to go out on a limb and guess that there are more parents at home with children who've opted not to return to the workforce and that most those parents are also white.
It's not the whole answer, but part of it.
Could be geography?
Asians are especially concentrated in just a few places, so an improvement in CA and WA (or even in just LA, SF and Seattle) would look like a big improvement in the Asian numbers. Hispanics are more dispersed, but still concentrated in (not all of) the US West.
In other words this could be saying more about how the West and South are doing relative to the Midwest and Northeast?