Here's the graph showing that employment is at a 40 year low.
Notice the sudden decline in 2001 and 2008?
And here is the graph showing the US population growth. Notice that there are more people every year?
So, quick question: If there are twice as many people now, than in 1950, how can the current number of workers have trouble paying for the retirees' Social Security payments?
OK, so that's an aside. The original question is about the unemployment rate. If we have MORE people every year, then how can the unemployment rate ever go up? Well, there would have to be slower job creation than baby creation.
This is either caused by a poor economy or immigrants that are children (like Obama's 100,000 unaccompanied minors from Latin America). It could also be caused by immigrants that are on welfare or are retired. The former is a well known fact. I've never heard of the latter.
Another interesting phenomenon is that the post war baby boom actually kept happening and has never stopped. The rate of increase in population made a sudden change to the positive after the Great Depression in 1940, again in 1950, and again in 1990. You can see that more easily when we zoom in and place some marks on the chart to highlight the point in time where it changes.
This rate of growth is the slope of the curve. Here I tried to show a green rate (safe), a blue rate (warning), a yellow rate (danger), and a red rate (we are f'd).
This ever increasing slope of the curve means that the post war baby boom is an ongoing thing. Not hardly. My three aunts had kids after the war when their husbands returned from the war. They had kids for five to twelve years each.
One aunt had two kids, another had four, and a third had nine. But, even this prolific aunt stopped having kids before 1960. She didn't have kids from 1946 to 2016. That's 70 years. Her uterus would have fallen out long before that! Besides that, she died of old age in 2008.
So, this "baby boom" is an ongoing thing. There should be no sudden drop in employment starting in 2001, nor another sharp decline starting in 2008.
What's interesting is that these sudden drops in employment coincide with two stock market bubble bursts. The first was tech stocks and internet stocks. The second was the housing bubble burst. (My stock dropped 67% between 2007 and 2008, and didn't come back for about five years.)
The 2001 drop in employment also coincided with 9/11, the destruction of the World Trade Center, the big crunch to the airline industry, and the start of (our involvement in) the war on terror, and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
These economic coincidences make much more sense than a NONEXISTENT, short term, baby boom after World War Two.
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