What's the source of the general increase from 1960 to 2000? The trend away from couples having one member stay at home running the house toward having both members with outside employment?

Yes, exactly.

This rate seems like it would hide the extremely real phenomenon of people being forced to work after 55.

> people being forced to work after 55.

Did you mean 65? Only teachers and a few other public union members regularly retire at 55 in the US, and even for them many choose to continue working to earn a fatter pension.

Except, of course, for the rare people disciplined enough to be frugal and invested a lot of every pay check, and became self made multi millionaires.

Thanks for posting this site. I was a bit confused by the recent dip in this chart:

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TOTLL2564

Until I realized it's likely due to COVID-19 deaths.

This is the labor force, as it says: "the sum of employed and unemployed persons."

So it only includes people who are working or looking for work. This kind of distinction is the key to the OP.

So thankfully the dip is mostly not deaths, but for example

- a second earner in a household who lost a job in April but hasn't looked for new work since, due to child care commitments

- a cook who was furloughed but knows there are no new kitchen jobs going right now, but isn't yet willing to do something else, so isn't looking

- a person who lost a job one year out from retirement and is just retiring early

https://www.bls.gov/cps/definitions.htm#nilf

That dip is more than 4M people, so I think it's still unexplained. Perhaps due to a shift in response rates or another artifact of COVID churn in the survey methodology?

No most of the COVID-19 deaths were in the older cohort. That wouldn't significantly impact the civilian labor force.

It’s a drop of 5M. 5M people haven’t died from Covid in the US. Plus it just went up by 2M.

But I am curious about that drop.

You're right, I was skim-reading it as a few thousands (and jumping to conclusions). Not sure what's going on with that dip.

Edit: It would be interesting to compare this to an up-to-date graph of US deaths (all kinds), if one exists.

Yeah. I remember back in 2016, all the self-proclaimed fact checkers insisted that the official headline unemployment rate was the real unemployment rate, and that any claims about employment that didn't match up with it were lies by Trump. Now that he's the incumbent...