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From 1999 To 2016, America Lost 11.4 Million People From the Workforce (washingtonpost.com)
Andrew Van Dam, writing for the Washington Post: Where did all the jobs go? Well, we're finally starting to find some satisfactory answers to the granddaddy of all economic questions. The share of Americans with jobs dropped 4.5 percentage points from 1999 to 2016 -- amounting to about 11.4 million fewer workers in 2016. At least half of that decline probably was due to an aging population. Explaining the remainder has been the inspiration for much of the economic research published after the Great Recession.
People look at employment and treat it as a measure of poverty. When that doesn't satisfy, they look at things like number of employed and the labor force participation rate. The dialogue goes in the direction of "why isn't everyone working?"
A comprehensive economic report would include income distribution, standard of living, number in poverty, number receiving aid, percent of GDP of aid disbursed, number homeless, number hungry, number in college, number retired, and so forth.
With a labor participation rate above 50%, excluding those in college and those in retirement, you've got single-adult households and multi-worker households: men and women are working. Single-adult households suggest labor force participation rate should be higher; whereas multi-worker households suggest wealth (to pay nurses, day cares, and the cost of appliances to do housework, freeing one householder to pursue a career for self-fulfillment) or poverty (to keep the household financially-solvent). Multi-adult, single-worker households tend to suggest wealth as well (non-workers can pursue non-work efforts for self-fulfillment).
This gets even more-complicated when you realize traditional family values don't describe today's world: not everyone wants kids and, while there are roughly an equal number of men and women, not every two-adult household is a male-female pairing. A single-worker lesbian household is still a woman working and a woman not-working; a single-worker gay male household is a man working and a man not-working. Which is more likely? How far does our workforce currently lean toward male workers and female non-workers? For that matter, how many households are now female-breadwinner households where the man doesn't work?
Unemployment isn't a flat descriptor of economy.
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It's so obvious that people who track this stuff for a living aren't sure.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have any data, or just your gut?
Where I work zero jobs were lost to automation. All of our cut jobs just had their duties dumped on someone else, who in 2009 was just happy to still have a job. Unfortunately after a decade, the company, and some employees, have forgotten that what they do used to be three jobs.