For instance, here’s manufacturing jobs per capita -- you can see that the bump during the Obama administration, while real, is truly nothing to get excited about.

https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/manufacturing-emplo...

Conversely it becomes clear that manufacturing jobs have been pretty much smoothly and steadily disappearing since World War II, and it seems (to me) highly unlikely that any kind of immediate policy solution is going to reverse that.

And here’s the civilian labor force participation rate that Will is talking about in the article:

https://www.numer.al/us_bls_data/figures/civilian-labor-forc...

You can see clearly how much lower the value is now than it was at the turn of the millennium -- this is Will’s point at the start of the piece -- but you can also see that we’re still above the entire 40s, 50s, 60s, and most of the 70s.

Although the difference there is that the people not participating in the labor force were, I’d have to guess, women. Interesting that Will focuses specifically on men. It doesn’t look like the BLS breaks labor participation out by gender, which would be interesting.

If there are other BLS stats of interest to HN readers, I haven’t finished making a way for other users to add their own scrapers, but I’m more than happy to add figures for other BLS data. Just let me know.