Now here's some shocking, and quite possibly disturbing, statistics to come out of a new October jobs report.
Nearly four in 10 Americans, or 92 million, are neither employed nor unemployed, but fall in the category of "not in the labor force," which means they aren't working now but haven't looked for work recently enough to be counted as unemployed, Washington Examiner reported.
But why are these Americans not part of the labor force, you ask? Quite simply because they have simply stopped trying to find jobs and would rather stay at home than work, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
By far the biggest chunk of people not in the labor force are people who simply don't want to be, according to data from the monthly Current Population Survey.
Last month, about 86 million adults, or 93 percent of all adults that are not part of the labor force, said they weren't working because they did not want a job, the federal job counter said.
Delving a bit deeper into these bizarre statistics, a Pew Research Center analysis attempted to figure out who these Americans were and what sort of ideology they represented.
According to the analysis, a majority of youthful Americans seem to be far less interested in searching and landing a job compared to previous generations. Lack of good-paying jobs, swelling laid-off workers and re-employment prospects could possibly be a crucial factor in discouraging the young generation.
Currently, 39 percent of 16- to 24-year-olds don't want to work, up from 29 percent in 2000.
While women, about 38 percent, said they would rather not have a job, men, about 28.5 percent, seemed to share the same feeling.
"Women are more likely than men to say they don't want a job, although the gap has been narrowing - especially since the Great Recession. Last month, 28.5 percent of men said they didn't want a job, up from 23.9 percent in October 2000 and 25.2 percent in October 2008," the research stated.
"For women, the share saying they didn't want a job hovered around 38 percent throughout the 2000s but began creeping up in 2010, reaching 40.2 percent last month," the Pew analysis added.
In a report issued in February, the Congressional Budget Office estimated "that about half the decline in labor-force participation was due to long-term demographic trends, a third was due to cyclical weaknesses in the labor market, and the rest a consequence of 'unusually protracted weakness in the demand for labor [which] appears to have led some workers to become discouraged and permanently drop out of the labor force,' such as by taking early retirement or signing up for Social Security disability benefits," according to Pew analysis.
