In a note seeking to “explain” why the US labor participation rate just crashed to a nearly 40 year low earlier today as another half a million Americans decided to exit the labor force bringing the total to 94.6 million people…

… this is what the Atlanta Fed has to say about the most dramatic aberration to the US labor force in history: “Generally speaking, people in the 25–54 age group are the most likely to participate in the labor market. These so-called prime-age individuals are less likely to be making retirement decisions than older individuals and less likely to be enrolled in schooling or training than younger individuals.”

This is actually spot on; it is also the only thing the Atlanta Fed does get right in its entire taxpayer-funded “analysis.”

However, as the chart below shows, when it comes to participation rates within the age cohort, while the 25-54 group should be stable and/or rising to indicate economic strength while the 55-69 participation rate dropping due to so-called accelerated retirement of baby booners, we see precisely the opposite. The Fed, to its credit, admits this: “participation among the prime-age group declined considerably between 2008 and 2013.”

And this is where the wheels fall off the Atlanta Fed narative. Because the regional Fed's very next sentence shows why the world is doomed when you task economists to centrally plan it:

The decrease in labor force participation among prime-age individuals has been driven mostly by the share who say they currently don't want a job. As of December 2014, prime-age labor force participation was 2.4 percentage points below its prerecession average. Of that, 0.5 percentage point is accounted for by a higher share who indicate they currently want a job; 2 percentage points can be attributed to a higher share who say they currently don't want a job.