zhe New Nark tines Evaporating Unemployment Binyamin Appelbaum: February 4, 2014 Before the recession in December 2007, about 63 percent of American adults at jobs. Six years later, in December 2013, less than 59 percent of adults have jobs. And a new analysis says that the recession and very little to do with it. The study, by two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, asserts that workforce participation is in long-term term decline. If the recession had never happen, or the economy had since we turn to complete health, the office estimate 59.3 percent of adults would have jobs, instead of 58 .6 percent. Employment fell sharply during a recession, of course, and the number of jobs still has not recovered completely even as the population has continued to grow. But as the baby boom ages into retirement, you are those are you with your people want those jobs. The problem of unemployment is a vibrating right before our eyes. The assertion has large consequences. It suggest that the rapid fall in the unemployment rate, which reached 6.7 percent in December, is an accurate measure of a labor market that is almost done healing. It follows that the feds stimulus campaign has nearly served its purpose, that it is time to retreat, perhaps even more quickly, and then some Fed officials are right to worry about doing too much. But this analysis is unlikely to be taken as the final word on the subject. Perhaps the most simple counterpoint is to consider adults in their prime working years, between 25 and 54. About 80 percent has jobs at the end of 2007; only 76 percent had jobs at the end of 2013. Indeed, the president of the New York Fed, William Dudley, has porn it to this data as evidence that the decline was caused by the recession, and I was just a petition for continuing the Fed's stimulus campaign. "Since the previous business cycle peak at the end of 2007, the decline of the labor force participation rate has been more than account