We ain't working on Maggie's farm

the evidence suggests there has been no significant drop in demand, but rather a change in the labor supply driven by declining interest in work relative to other options
Scott Winship's research discussed in various blogs like Askblog.

Now I have retired early and often.  When off work the cash pile is best spent spreading out the time because getting hired, especially for the politically incorrect, is an expensive pain in the ass.  The alternative is to do a job right here, in the breakfast nook with a coffee stained ten year old notebook.  

Even then, as a geek, my software effort seldom went beyond spaghetti proof of concept.  That is what the Open Software foundation discovered.  The transaction costs of hiring people was more than the cost of just grinding out and publishing a solution to the problem being solved. One could examine the hiring ads in the public tech market, and reverse engineer the particular problem, ponder it and run a proof of concept test.

The low barrier to entry in software vs the transactional employment costs.  The problem is everywhere, high tradebook uncertainty in the labor markets.