Who's left the job market? Comparing 2007-2010 to 2010-2013

Recently Reuters ran this article : U.S. jobs market dropouts increasingly likely to stay out

And they had this nice bit of information : 

''According to economists who have analyzed Labor Department data, 6.6 million people exited the workforce from 2010 and 2013. About 61 percent of these dropouts were retirees, more than double the previous three years' share.

People dropping out because of disability accounted for 28 percent, also up significantly from 2007-2010. Of those remaining, 7 percent were heading to school, while the other 4 percent left for other reasons.

In contrast, between 2007 and 2010, retirees made up a quarter of the six million people who left the labor force, while 18 percent were classified as disabled. About 57 percent were either in school or otherwise on the sidelines.''

Lets look at that graphically :

and

Thats a pretty big shift.   

The more recent 3 years we can see that most of the people leaving are leaving for retirement.  Thats a demographic change we'd expect due to the baby boomers retiring.   Theres also a fair amount of people going into disability, and I assume many of them are baby boomers too.   Thats also a pretty expected trend.

Compared to the 07-10 period when most people left to go to school or 'other'.  Annoyingly the article doesn't break down the % of people who went to school versus other reasons and lumps them together.   But clearly that large of a drop in the labor pool for school or other is not explained by demographics and is not expected. 


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