00:01
So here we're presented with some information about male labor force participation, and it's two parts.
00:07
So first, which group experienced the largest decline? let's just do some quick arithmetic and calculate some changes from this table, which i've copied down.
00:16
So for the 15 to 24s, the change was minus 5 % in labor force participation.
00:21
For the 25s to 54s, it was minus 4%.
00:25
And for the 55 pluses, it was minus 15%.
00:29
So obviously the biggest change is with the seniors or the soon -to -be seniors had the biggest change.
00:36
So we obviously don't have enough information just from this table to figure out exactly why this happened.
00:44
But we could come up with some reasons about stories that might affect older people.
00:52
First of all is just simply people getting richer, right? and we might expect more early retirements as a result.
01:07
If living standards are generally increasing overtime, maybe one story about why people are retiring in this 55 and over category is that they're going to be a lot richer.
01:19
A second one is life expectancy.
01:27
If americans are living longer and they are spending more, more time alive in their 70s and 80s and 90s, then that 55 and over category is going to get older and older and older and older.
01:39
You know, back in the bad old days, maybe people didn't live that long.
01:42
And so most of that 55 and overgroup was people in their 50s, late 50s or in their 60s...