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Comment by lmpdev | Hacker News Reader

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lmpdev·

Unemployment is also a poor metric in and of itself as it discounts large groups of people

Participation rate is much more meaningful IMO

Example, the participation rate is currently ~67%, so its inverse is 33%.

This means that 33% of the working age population are currently not employed

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That is not at all what the labor force participation rate means.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART

> The Labor Force Participation Rate is defined by the Current Population Survey (CPS) as “the number of people in the labor force as a percentage of the civilian noninstitutional population […] the participation rate is the percentage of the population that is either working or actively looking for work.”

Why is it meaningful given that the 33% includes people who have no desire to work?

No desire today != no desire tomorrow. A lower participation rate might indicate untapped potential or barriers to employment, such as lack of childcare or training opportunities.

How healthy would the economy be if 100% had no desire to work? That depends on why those people don't want to work and the overall situation, but until all of our needs are served by robots in reality likely not so healthy.

Do you have a link for that, or are you just making up numbers? (Please don't make up statistics.)

These sources both give the civilian labor force participation rate as 62.5% in December 2023.

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CIVPART/

https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-lab...

Agreed. And what percentage of the employed workforce (that 67%) are in low wages jobs compared to 1972?

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