It's fascinating to me that even august publications like the Wall Street Journal continue to use 'unemployment rate' as any kind of reliable metric, and says stuff like 'the unemployment rate is at a 50 year low now'. Unemployment just measures those who are actively looking for full-time employment but are unable to find it (and yes there is a separate underemployment metric, which seems a little more accurate).

The reason we have 'slack' in the labor market is because the adult prime-age participation rate in the economy was quite low for a long time after 2008, and even now is only getting back to early 2000s numbers. This just seems like a much better metric to understand the health of the labor market & perceived slack. Disability has exploded over the last 20-30 years, and someone collecting a disability check- especially if they are simply milking the system- doesn't show up as 'unemployed' because they're not actively looking for work. It's actually pretty concerning for the US how low the adult participation rate has fallen. There's pretty good evidence that this decade of low interest rates has started to slowly bring in people off the sidelines who weren't looking for work, had given up, were in the informal sector and weren't counted, etc. That's a massively good thing for society.

I don't think you can understand labor market slack or the point at which wages will start to rise until you ditch the somewhat gimmicky 'unemployment rate' and start looking at adult participation in the economy period