Many times when we publish a story about Minnesota job growth or the unemployment rate, readers rightly point out that the data doesn't tell the whole story.
One point they make is that so many people have given up on finding a job that it forces down the labor force participation rate, which skews the unemployment rate -- 5.5 percent in February -- downward. There are thousands of people who don't have jobs who are not counted when the unemployment rate is calculated, the argument goes.
It's true that the labor force participation rate has been dropping in our state. It's not clear at all, however, that this is evidence that large numbers of people who would rather work have given up and dropped out of the labor force.
First, let's define the labor force participation rate. It is the percentage of people 16 and older who are not in the military, prison or a mental health institution (the adult civilian non-institutionalized population) who are either working or trying to work (the labor force). The rate can be calculated by dividing labor force by civilian non-institutionalized population, which, to be clear, includes everyone who is retired, even those who are 100 years old.
So: LFP = Labor force/Civilian non-institutionalized population
As you can see in the chart below, Minnesota's labor force participation rate has fallen for the past decade. Though it moved slightly upward in January, it dipped again in February and remains 4 percentage points lower than it was exactly 10 years ago, in February 2003.

The state labor force -- again, those either working or actively looking for work -- is as large as it has ever been, in raw numbers. It's just under 3 million strong. But the "civilian non-institutionalized population" -- again, that's everyone 16 and older who isn't in prison, a mental health institution or the military -- has also been growing. It now numbers 4.2 million people. That's why the labor force participation rate has fallen: The civilian population is growing faster relative to the labor force.

So what we have in Minnesota is 365,000 more people who could conceivably be in the workforce than we did in 2003. But only 105,000 more people actually in the workforce.