OPP Newsletter

WhoIsJohnGalt

A couple of weeks ago I took a look at the 2010 census and discovered something frightening. Here it is:

21,668,000 people between the ages of 20-24.
82,229,000 people between the ages of 25-44
81,780,000 people between the ages of 45-64

This adds up to 185,677,000 people of working age.

To find the percentage of people who are not working for wh**ever reason, you must divide this number by the total number of people who are in the age range to be working, that is to say people between the ages of 20 to 64 and then multiply the answer by 100. I do not count anyone under the age of twenty, because they do not make enough money to be self-supporting and they have a difficult time finding a job during the good times. These are not good times.

So according to CNS news the number of people who are not working is 89,008,000, or written in scientific notation it is 8.9 x 10^7. Divide that by the total population and multiply it by 100 to get a percentage of the population who is not working.
((8.90 x 10^7) / (1.86 x 10^8))*100 = (4.78 x 10^-1) * 100 = 0.478 x 100 = 48 percent.

Allowing for round off errors this is likely fifty percent of the working age population not working for one reason or the other. Even if this is too high by a factor of two, it is still twenty four to twenty five percent of the population who is of an age to be holding a full time job. Notice the number of people who are just now entering the job market. Realize that this number is not very likely to increase by much and then you will see that we are all about to fall off of a demographic cliff.

I have been puzzling over where all the unemployed were ever since I wrote this two weeks ago. Now, thanks to the above linked article, it becomes clear. The government does not count people on disability as being "unemployed" as it should. What we really need to know is how many people are gainfully employed, not the nutty BS that BLS generates.