This is a nice connection and it's a kind of what's known as a structuralist argument - what you're saying is that the approach of "uptime is uptime is uptime" is wrong, and distribution of /where/ downtime happens actually matters a lot. Economics did run into similar issues with GDP because it assumed for a long time that "money is money is money", until it found out that just because both Iraq and Vietnam have similar GDPs doesn't mean that they're at all equivalent - one is heavily dependent on oil and has few development prospects, the other has a wealth of productive know how in a ton of different areas (shameless plug, I work on this tool):

Iraq http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/network/?country=108&pa...

vs

Vietnam http://atlas.cid.harvard.edu/explore/network/?country=239&pa...

Each node here is a specific product being exported "significantly" for a country of that size.

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So by a similar argument you could look at how similar the population that goes in and out of unemployment (seems likely to me) is every year, and what that implies about policies and job opportunities in the US.