Job Market’s 2.6 Million Missing People Unnerves Star Harvard Economist
New research from Raj Chetty pinpoints a lasting economic scar from the pandemic: Low-wage workers in high-cost areas aren’t returning to the labor force.
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Behind the five-decade low US unemployment rate of 3.5% lies a 2.6 million-person mystery.
That’s roughly how many more Americans should be working or looking for jobs if the economy’s labor force participation rate was the same as before the Covid-19 pandemic. But something’s still off, leaving everyone from mom-and-pop businesses to Federal Reserve economists scrambling to answer a crucial question: Where are these workers?