Rachel Barber

speaker

271 appearances 2 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 21 Aug

Rachel Barber’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 1.

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The Excerpt · America’s workforce is shrinking. What’s going on? · 22 Jul 2026 podcast

But for the most part, this is a weak print.

I think that that's a valid point for economists to point out, and they have.

And I think overall, I would just say that this is just one month, and this is an estimate that will be revised next month and the following month after that.

And Federal Reserve Chair Kevin Warsh, when he was recently testifying in front of the Senate, he also made that point saying that this is just one jobs report.

We're going to need to see some more data to solidify this as a trend.

But for now, just sort of one troubling sign.

But we'll have to wait and get some more data in the next couple of months.

So that's the interesting thing is that for most age groups and most demographic groups, the labor force participation rate is down.

It's not down for absolutely everyone, but generally it's down across the board.

In particular, the labor force participation rate for older workers, those 55 and up, is

fell to a 21-year low in June.

And so that is sort of the standout group.

We've also seen women leave the workforce in sort of record numbers over the last couple of years.

And we can get into some of the reasons why.

But overall, I think economists are a bit concerned that this isn't just something we're seeing in one specific group.

We're seeing it in several groups.

So there's probably as many reasons why you would leave the workforce as there are people leaving the workforce.

It's a very personal decision, obviously, but there are some trends that we can sort of pull out.

The first is

Potentially as hiring processes have grown longer, people aren't doing fifth round, sixth round interviews, and maybe they get on and it's an AI agent interviewing them instead of a person.

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