No motivation, considering taking time off -- what are some....

[Dr. Courtney]

Why whine about jobs, as if someone owes you one? Find an unmet need and start a business!

 

[Logical Dog]

I am sure Ozil, if you work hard, get decent grades, and do well at interviews + tailor your cv and get those certs...you will land a job. Keep it up : - ) and as Dr said you can even do your own business if you can find such unmet needs. :)

 

[StatGuy2000]

There's never such a thing as a perfect economy with no negative indicators, but you have to admit that it takes a pretty deep dive into secondary indicators to find those negatives. That's what that article is about. In this example, not only is it a secondary indicator, but one has to dig into it to find a negative part of it, since the first two explanations for the stat are both positives or at worst neutral! So I'd have to see the stat that they/you are referring to to know how significant it is. But I can say this: after a recession, that number will lag because obviously unemployment has to go down first before people come back into the labor market. So even if that number is higher than what one would call "good" (I don't know because the stat isn't offered), it is still almost certainly trending rapidly in the right direction. And more to the point, with us being essentially at full employment, there is no good excuse for those people to stay out of the labor market.

That is a clear negative, but again, when you have to dig into a positive stat to find a negative component, you're working reeealy hard to spin an overall positive as a negative.

russ, I didn't really delve that deeply into the statistics on this, so I fully acknowledge that more investigation is required to determine how significant the "discouraged worker" phenomenon is at the time the report was published (which was presumably based on 2013-2014 numbers). More to the point, I would be very interested to see if the percentage of Americans in the work force has shifted significant based on 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 data.

That one is now well out of date. It had been of significant concern/surprise during the recovery, but the census bureau updates those numbers annually, in September. So despite being only a 10 month old story, that's 2013-14 numbers. The 2014-15 jump in median income was huge:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/13/news/economy/median-income-census/

In my post, I was precisely looking for evidence of a change in the wage growth, which you have provided (based on the same CNN money section from which I have previously referred to). It is interesting to note the jump in median income between 2014-2015. I would be curious to see what the median income would be for the 2015-2016 period.

[As an aside, it may be worth noting that these jumps in median income occurred under the watch of the Obama administration, and so one could argue that the Obama administration, and Democrats in general, should get credit for this, to the extent that the US federal government has control or influence over the US economy. But I digress.]