The Express Employment Services "The Great Shift" study is out and I am busy reviewing it. While reviewing it an article came out which made me question one of their arguments. In "The Great Shift" they make the case that more people have left the workforce in the last few years and instead availed themselves of social security disability. While I am still looking at all the research (and to their credit it is extensive) I saw an article on the Atlantic that provides an interesting counterpoint.
Jordan Weissman has an article called "Why the poor don't work, according to the poor", which you can read here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/09/why-the-poor-dont-work-according-to-the-poor/279900/
Jordan cites census survey data that explores what factors are influencing those who are making less than the poverty level and are unemployed. The majority of responses fall under the following reasons: ill or disabled, can't find work, family reasons, retired, school or other. While he discusses his take on the numbers (and how they lead to more questions than answers), he also lists the survey respondent numbers from 1994 to 2012. This gives a great perspective on the growth and change amongst this income bracket. What stood out to me is while the absolute number of respondents who answered "ill or disabled" grew by 62% over this time period, the total number of respondents grew the exact same percentage. This implies that there has been no real increase amongst this population, which is contrary to the case put forward by the Express Employment report "The Great Shift"
However, this survey is focused only on those who did not work in the last year and does not examine the same population as "The Great Shift" does (which is the long term unemployed). So this may be explained with more data. More to come, on this and other items!
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