Almost all of us know (because President Trump boasts of it in nearly every speech) that our 3.5% unemployment rate has reached a 50-year low. But this official decline in joblessness doesn’t tell the entire story of the improvement in the job market in the United States. And it doesn’t fully capture the change in direction between what happened under President Barack Obama and Trump.

In the Obama years, the unemployment rate kept falling after 2010. That’s great. But the untold story was that the number of people moving from the living room couch into jobs was exceeded by the number who dropped out of the workforce, or, as was the case with millions of 20-somethings, never got a job. From January 2009 to December 2016, almost 10 million jobs were added, but amazingly, 1.6 million working-age people dropped out of the workforce.