> I think it makes more sense to look at this graph:
That depends entirely on what you want to know. If you want to know the outcome on individual happiness and economic power, then no, it doesn't.
Whatever the reason, or whatever is reasonable (I do agree it's unreasonable to expect old people to work) the fact of the matter is that what 1 working individual in the 60s was producing was divided between 1.3 individuals. Today, it's > 2 (and that's in America, EU is worse). That's bound to have an impact on those individuals, the working ones, and the ones needing support.
Also another way of saying the same is that the generating coming of age in the 1980s and 1990s refused to have sufficient numbers of children. That is the reason the working age population now is stagnant (in practice shrinking).
But of course, the generation coming of age now is much worse when it comes to children. I understand why : it's harder. Even just having a bedroom for your child, just that expense, is ridiculous. It's so ridiculous that people making $100k+ in Silicon Valley have trouble doing so.
Still, the reason doesn't matter, and of course the net result will be a further shrinking working population in 20 years.
I'm not talking about the economy so much as the idea that everyone who wants a job has one (vis-a-vis full employment). Presumably men want jobs at a similar rate as they did in the 1960s (modulo the aging aspect which I had forgotten to account for).
> I'm not talking about the economy so much as the idea that everyone who wants a job has one (vis-a-vis full employment).
Full employment is the absence of cyclical unemployment, not “everyone who wants a job has one”.
Particularly, it's compatible with an arbitrarily high level of structural unemployment. The “rovots eat jobs” argument, for instance, is one of ever-escalating structural unemployment.
I can imagine that women entering the labor force had a negative impact on men wanting jobs. I know that stay at home dads aren't exactly common but they aren't unheard of either. Could have a couple points of impact.
1) Women entering the workforce
2) An aging population
I think it makes more sense to look at this graph:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
Which shoes that the % of prime age people in the work force is up significantly since the 50s/60s/70s.