Andrew Yang on economics: what the evidence says · JRE #1245
“Like 94 million or so Americans have left the workforce over the last number of years. Now, a lot of that's natural demographics, a lot of that's people in school, but about 5 million of it is unskilled men who've gotten pushed out of the workforce.”
What the evidence says
The Bureau of Labor Statistics does publish a "not in labor force" figure that was approximately 94 million around the time this episode aired, so the headline number Yang cites is a technically accurate raw BLS statistic. But fact-checkers examining this same statistic when used by other political figures (e.g., Donald Trump in 2017) found it conflates everyone of working age who is neither employed nor job-seeking -- including retirees, students, people with disabilities, and caregivers -- with people idled from work involuntarily. PolitiFact's analysis, cited by NBC News, concluded the real number of Americans out of work and still in the job market was closer to 21 million, about a quarter of the headline figure. Applying that same critique here, Yang's use of the 94 million figure is misleading in the same way. Yang's further claim that "about 5 million" of that total consists specifically of unskilled men pushed out by automation is a separate estimate not corroborated by BLS data or found in available fact-checking coverage; no primary source verifying that specific 5 million figure was located.