Here is a mystery. Ever since the pandemic, Black men have been increasing their participation in the labor force. By March of this year they had increased their participation rate to match white men for the first time in history.
Then, in a single month, participation for Black men suddenly tumbled by 2.7 percentage points and never recovered. Everyone else showed (small) gains that month and ever since.
Unsurprisingly, the unemployment rate shows the same thing. In the past two months unemployment among Black men has suddenly surged from 4.5% to 5.9%. Everyone else has showed no change.
Now, all this does is put Black men back to exactly where they were before the pandemic: an overall labor force participation rate of about 68% and an unemployment rate of about 6%. Still, why the steady gains for three years followed by a plunge in April? What's going on?
In a few days we'll have some wage data for the second quarter, which will tell us if the decline in Black participation has been matched by a decline in Black wages. In the meantime, this is just something to ponder.
Seems like a noisy data series. February and March were as big or bigger outliers than April-June, but in the opposite direction.
Let's wait a bit longer before we assume this means anything at all.
Yes.
Yeah, there are pretty sizable drops from May to July of 2022 and from June to December of 2021. They're not quite as fast but they are similar in size, and I don't think we'd conclude that something unusual happened during those months.
It's worth keeping an eye on, but seems too soon to speculate.
Noise, or that also looks like it could be a reporting artifact.
I have no idea how they collect this data, was there a state (or some other unit of collection) that changed how it collects or reports?
This is the most obvious piece of meaningless statistical noise I have ever seen. Why did you even post this?
Why did the market suddenly abandon African American men from the labor force in April?