Quote:
Originally posted by Secret_Agent_Man
All I was doing is trying to explain concepts to a particularly thickheaded poster.
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Why am I thickheaded? Because I am not willing to accept without question this concept that people can get so discouraged by the job market that they just drop out of the labor force?
Have there been any well-designed empirical studies of this phenomena to show that it in fact, not just in theory, occurs to the degree that people claim it does or do we just have newspaper reports of guys like Bobb in Scranton?
All too often in the soft "sciences" like economics and sociology, no one ever actually does an empirical study to try to learn if the assumptions that underlie the theories that get bantered about are even valid. Until someone actually does that, the discouraged worker wannabe/labor force drop-out is just a post-hoc explanation of why the numbers don't add up.
One man's thickheadedness is another woman's intellectual curiosity.
