“Unfit for Work: the startling rise of disability in America”

On Friday, March 22, NPR and Planet Money started a one-week series of stories on the growing number of people with disablities and therefore are unable to work. You can find a link to the main story above along with the first installment of a radio piece by Chana Joffe-Walt as heard on All Things Considered here.

Joffe-Walt helps explain the potential reasons why an increasing number people are considered by the government to be too disabled to work, both through statistics and various charts, as well as through the stories of people she met throughout the country while reporting.

A primary question in the first radio story was: why, with the labor market becoming increasingly technology-based – and thus, less physically demanding overall – are there still so many people being added to “the 14 million Americans who are invisible to the economy?”