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Comment by snarf21 | Hacker News Reader

I agree this is a weird way to measure it but I think we don't measure it correctly. We don't measure underemployment, meaning people who used to work full time but have stopped even looking for work (*and are not retired). I'd like to see unemployment measured more like total population minus those employed.

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They do have a measure that also reflects underemployment. The broadest measure is called U-6, "Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force." That also include the U-5, "discouraged workers, a subset of the marginally attached, have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work."

The measures are available, and they're usually in the vicinity of twice the regularly-reported (U-3) rate.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

The BLS reports 6 different unemployment metrics. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

Several of them do measure underemployment.

This is the key.

The government and media largely rely on U-3 (IIRC) when reporting unemployment. The upside is consistency - they all use the same number. The downside is this figure may not be fully representative of the economy.

I would argue that U-5 or U-6 better represent the state of the economy (as it relates to employment), as both included some set of under-employed and recently-given-up would-be workers.

But, we'd have to make a concerted effort to cut over to those numbers to avoid confusion.

U-3 will still be useful for answering many questions even if it becomes a lesser-used stat among politicians, because it's been tracked for much longer and because it's tracked by almost every nation. You're not going to magically squeeze U-6 numbers out of Ireland in 1952.

Examples:

"How bad is our current recession compared to the great depression for the workforce?"

"How might raising the top marginal income tax bracket to 70% affect the labor market?"

"How does relaxing strict immigration policies contribute to job loss in a nation (if at all)?"

Absolutely true. No disagreement there.

But, given an increasing income disparity between the top ~5% and bottom half, and a continuing sense of "being left behind" by many workers in labor-intensive industries, it seems doing a better job of describing those disenchanted workers (whether they be part-time at AutoZone, or recently given up looking, etc) would be beneficial to all.

For one of those disenchanted employees, seeing "Unemployment is at all-time lows! The DOW is at a record high!" on the evening news (while they're working 3 part-time jobs for $9/hour and zero benefits) isn't just unhelpful, it's insulting.

That's captured in the workforce participation rate, which is indeed at a 20 year low: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

(I've scrolled 1/3rd down the page and am picking you at semi-random for this comment, so this isn't just a criticism of your framing, but of plenty I've seen so far)

A lot of comments here are heavily biased towards accurately accounting for the retirement end of life, without considering the other end - people who are intentionally not working or are under-employed for some other reason. The one I had mainly in mind was highschool and college-aged students who are working part-time: they'd get included in under-employment, but aren't necessarily looking for a living wage yet because they have other priorities, so they don't get included in unemployment counts.

Also,

> I'd like to see unemployment measured more like total population minus those employed.

This measure would include children who can't even work part-time.

Fair enough. I should have been more specific. My intent is that it is people of working age. This needs to also account for status of school and retirement. However, we should be able to get trivial numbers for these from SS and college reporting to get an fairly accurate number.

In that sense you'll get people such as Bill Gates as unemployed as they are not on the payroll.

So? He's not statistically significant.

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