
The US unemployment rate measure is deceptive - prostoalex
https://qz.com/877432/the-us-unemployment-rate-measure-is-deceptive-and-doesnt-need-to-be/
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JakeAl
How the Government Measures Unemployment
[https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm](https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm)

Beyond the unemployed there are separate numbers published by BLS for those
not in the labor force. This number is at about 95 Million.

Who is not in the labor force?
[https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#nilf](https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm#nilf)

The numbers
[https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm)

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vannevar
As long as the metrics are consistent, then for most applications it doesn't
matter whether they precisely measure actual unemployment, only that they
track it. The second graph indicates that this generally holds true, with some
divergence due to the Great Recession. Public policy initiatives are pretty
blunt instruments, and it is usually enough to say that they are working when
the unemployment index is going down and not working when it's going up.
Anything beyond that is relying on a level of precision that neither the
measurements nor the policies justify.

~~~
trendia
That's not entirely true. Consider the metric "Yearly Income" which has been
consistently measured for decades. It is a proxy for "Total Compensation" but
isn't exactly the same because the latter includes health benefits, vacation
pay, etc.

In the last decade, total compensation has risen drastically while income has
not. If you only measure income, then it will appear as though the lowest paid
fulltime workers did not see as great of gains as the highest-paid workers,
when in fact the difference is much smaller when you include health benefits.

So, income is an example of a consistently-measured metric that does not
really corelate with the attribute that most people would care about (total
compensation) and thus does not act as a good proxy for the measured
attribute.

~~~
vannevar
But in the employment case, the proposed 'improved' metric tracks very
closely, with some divergence around the recession. Obviously, if that
divergence continued indefinitely so that the metrics didn't track together
anymore, your argument would hold.

As a side note, the increase in income inequality is not "much smaller" when
benefits are included. See for example [https://ourworldindata.org/incomes-
across-the-distribution/](https://ourworldindata.org/incomes-across-the-
distribution/). The gap is almost entirely due to soaring executive
compensation, and since there is no correlation between performance and
executive compensation (some studies even show an inverse correlation:
[https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-
inverse-c...](https://cooleypubco.com/2016/07/25/new-study-shows-inverse-
correlation-between-ceo-pay-and-performance-over-the-long-term/)), any natural
brake on the spiraling salaries seems to have failed.

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DrScump
"According to the November 2016 data, over 5.5 million Americans said they
want a job, but don’t have one, and are _not considered a part of the labor
force_. If these people were included in the unemployment rate, it would jump
to _8.2%._ (a rate 72% higher)"

~~~
samfisher83
3 million of these 5 million did not look for job in the last year. Hard to
get a job if you don't search for one.

~~~
DrScump
Those did not _report to EDD_ that they were looking for work during that
census period, Not the same thing.

Another way that the number is fudged is that those who are eligible to work
under DAPA are not counted in the population until/unless they are employed
(in an actual W-2 or 1099 job).

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notonodejs
The philosophy behind the change is that they are now publishing 'structural
unemployment': the amount of people who will be unemployed no matter what
(because of an inherent lack of jobs).

This is opposed to the old use 'transient unemployment' which means the amount
of people who do not currently have a job, perhaps because they are searching.

