for more about all this, we are joined from washington by sudeep reddy, economics editor at the "wall street journal." so, one of the articles in the "journal "said 60,000 people dropped out of the labor force last month. put that in perspective for us. >> that's right. we've seen over the course of the recovery millions of people just giving up hope, dropping out. the vast majority of people appear to be dropping out, just because they can't finded if jobs and it's not worth staying in. so to see that many people pull out, right now, the labor force participation rate is around 63%. that means there are millions of people who were in the the labor force before, before the recession started in 2007, who aren't coming back in, even when we see improvement in the overall economy, improvement in the labor market. >> sreenivasan: so what are some of the long-term consequences of this low participation rate? >> for the individuals, they're really quite tragic. it means if you're not in the labor force, in a job that suits your skills, that means you're going to spend decades down the line