This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 11th, 2015.

I'm Caleb Brown.

In his academic career economist Robert Higgs has provided some of the most compelling arguments and data to challenge assumptions

about the New Deal and economic interventionism more broadly.

In his new book Taking a Stand, Higgs reflects on life, liberty, and the economy.

We spoke yesterday.

Eight or seven years after the financial crisis,

economists like yourself had argued the crisis occurred well before then, but we saw the results

of the housing boom and bust in 2008.

So where do things stand economically now? Well this has been an

extraordinarily in anemic recovery as everybody's recognized the the

weakest recovery of any recession since World War II.

So the economy is by no means operating in what would be called a robust

manner and one of the major items of a mystery, to me at least, has to do with the number of people

who have simply disappeared from the workforce.

The ratio of employment to population dropped abruptly in 2008 by about five percentage points, which is in five or six

million people who just weren't even looking for work anymore.

And they've stayed not looking for work and it's not clear what they're doing you know how are they

living how are they occupying themselves where did they go and this is not a trivial thing.

It's not just an idle puzzle because five or six million producers

disappearing from the productive apparatus, so far as the official statistics are concerned

at least, is a big deduction from the productive potential of the economy.

...