Is it true that Idaho teens aren’t working, even though jobs are plentiful? Not recently!

On June 7, 2019 at the Idaho Freedom Foundation web site Mr. Wayne Hoffman posted an article titled Jobs are plentiful, but Idaho teens aren’t working. That article was republished on June 10, 2019 as an opinion column in the Idaho Press. The first two paragraphs stated that:

“Though their population has increased, there are fewer Idaho teenagers in the workforce than there were 20 years ago. In 1998, more than 25,000 Idahoans between the ages of 14 and 18 were employed, two decades later, about 24,500 Idaho youngsters earn a paycheck, according to government data.

That four percent drop in the number of young employees today versus 1998 is amplified by the fact that Idaho’s population was 1.2 million then, and 1.7 million now. The state’s total workforce has grown by 35 percent.”

But a drop of 500 from 25,000 to 24,500 is a decrease of 2%, not 4%. Wayne should ask an Idaho teen to show him how to calculate percentages.

Is that a realistic description of teen employment in the state? Mr. Hoffman did not bother to specify where in the government he got the data from. Actually it comes from the U.S. Census and is on a web page for the QWI Explorer.

The tables shown above describe how employment has actually changed from 1992 to 2018 for eight age groups in Idaho.

They also are shown as a series of line graphs. Look at the light green line for Ages 14 to 18. It looks like a roller coaster. After the Great Recession employment for all eight groups increased linearly.   
  

I replotted just the data points using an Excel spreadsheet. As is shown above, employment peaked twice - in 2000 (26,886) and in 2007 (26,721). It also had two minimums in 2004 (22,189) and 2011 (13,576). The latest point for 2018 (24,559), and one for 1998 (25,051) [green arrows] Mr. Hoffman cherry-picked to compare teen employment do not do the data justice. From 2013 to 2018 it increased linearly, by an average of 1731 per year [as shown by the dotted red line]. What teens actually have been doing recently is increasingly going to work. Mr. Hoffman’s ‘drop’ came from cherry-picking just 2 points two decades apart, and ignoring the complicated details of what went on in between them. He equally well could have started 25 years ago at 1993 (20,812). Then he would have said employment rose by 18% rather than dropping by 4%. (The average for all 27 years is 21,859 so the 1993 number is more representative than the higher 1998 one).    
  
After Mr. Hoffman ‘viewed with alarm’ that alleged drop, he went on to ‘point with pride’ at his own teen employment. But a look at all the data instead leaves us with the title of a 1965 song Pete Townshend wrote for The Who – The Kids Are Alright.