Who Has COVID-19 Put Out of Work?

I guess I’m just perpetually confused these days. The Wall Street Journal—following the lead of lots of other news outlets—tells us today that labor force participation has dropped during the pandemic, and that it’s especially dropped for women. On the first claim, it’s hard to say anything other than “duh.” We have deliberately closed businesses and put people out of work, so of course labor participation is down. As for the second, here’s the chart:

The participation rate for men has dropped 1.6 percentage points. The participation rate for women has dropped 2.0 percentage points. This is not a big difference, and in any case it’s all due to noise between August and October. It could turn around completely next month. Or it could get worse. Who knows?

Journalists seem bound and determined to slice and dice economic data these days looking for tiny differences that they can spin into a narrative of some kind. They should stop. The fact that employment is down is inevitable, and it tells us nothing about whether it will recover when the pandemic recedes. And when you start slicing small numbers into ever smaller ones, it tells you less than nothing.

If there’s something big happening, then by all means tell the story. But if you’re relying on fractions of a percent in a noisy data series, it’s time to step back and think about whether you’re really sure anything serious is going on.

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We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

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