>>>There's something else at work here.
>>>https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/men-unemployment-jobs.html
>>>There are more than 10 million men between 25 and 54 in the US who just dropped out of the work force.
>>>No wall involved there.
>
>From your citation:
>
>One likely hypothesis, discussed in a recent paper by the economists Katharine G. Abraham and Melissa S. Kearney, is that the rise in nonparticipation is related to declining opportunities for those with low levels of education.
>
>Economists who study rising inequality, like my Harvard colleagues Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, attribute a large share of it to skill-biased technological change — the tendency for advances in technology to enhance the productivity and wages of workers who have certain skills while reducing the demand for those who don’t. Unskilled workers are left with the choice of accepting lower wages or leaving the labor force. This hypothesis is consistent with the fact that labor force participation has fallen more for workers with lower levels of educational attainment.
>
>Compounding these trends is international trade, which can have much the same effects as technology. Whether an American manufacturing worker is replaced by a robot or a Chinese worker, the result is the same: job displacement. (The benefit to consumers — lower prices — is the same, too.) If the jobs that remain available are much less attractive than the one a worker just lost, he may give up looking.
>
>Want to get wages up and increase labor participation? Maybe repatriate some of the manufacturing jobs offshored by Mich and his buddies, and stop allowing low-skilled workers to flood into the US if there's reduced demand for such workers. All that does is drive down wages for the benefit of the exploiting class.
>
>If only any US politician were brave enough to propose such policies! ;-)

Interesting, but it doesn't correlate with the fact that we can't get people to drive school busses or drive long haul tractors.

If your hypothesis worked, our school kids would have to learn Spanish to speak with the bus drivers.

Here's a thought:

Maybe for a lot of people - working just doesn't work.

I had a heart-wrenching conversation with a user at a client today.
She's a single mother of a 10 year-old and a 3 year-old. The user is a daughter of Hispanic immigrants.
She's a user from heaven, John - smart, upbeat and very productive.
Last Thursday she called with a question and I could barely understand her.
When I asked what was wrong, she said she had pneumonia.
Imagine working with pneumonia, John.
She called again today- Tuesday- and sounded almost as bad.
Having had a serious siege with pneumonia last year myself, I asked her if she was taking her meds and she said that her insurance didn't cover the anti-biotics and so she couldn't afford them.
I told the owner- an owner from heaven- who didn't know anything about it and he'll pay for her meds.
This happens daily and it's outrageous, John.
Hardworking people aren't earning enough to survive while others are buying $20million condo's in NYC.


What's the answer?

I'm not an economist, but any solution begins with recognizing the problem.