How many people should be working in America?

Excellent coverage of the relatively low participation rate in the US. While many have said that this undermines the positive colour of the low unemployment rate. Econvbrowser has first-rate coverage of some other scenarios.

Econbrowser: How many people should be working in America?: "The method that Bradbury used in order to arrive at her lowest estimate, 1.6 million, of the number of missing jobs, was to look at the change between the current participation rate for a given demographic group and its value when the recession started in March 2001, and compare this change with the corresponding 4-year change following each of the recessions in 1960, 1969, 1973, 1981, and 1990. This essentially amounts to assuming that the slope of a linear trend fit from 1960-1994 could be extrapolated to 2001-2005 to identify the magnitude that we should normally be expecting for that figure. In the case of mature men, that's maybe not such a bad assumption, and in fact Bradbury finds that for men aged 45-54, the participation rate in 2005 is actually higher than one might have predicted based on the previous 5 downturns. On the other hand, for women aged 35-44, this amounts to assuming that the increase in women's labor force participation rates between 1960 and 1994 should have continued to climb upward, and, since it has not, Bradbury finds 1.1 million 'missing' jobs in this group alone."