Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are functionally unemployed, economic analysis finds | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 25% of U.S. workers are functionally unemployed, economic analysis finds

cbsnews.com

21 pointsmakaimc7 comments

The referenced statistic they suggest paying attention to https://www.lisep.org/tru.

For perspective - July 2026: 24.9%, All-time low (june 2023): 22.3%, 2008 Financial Crisis Peak: 34.8%, Covid Peak: 34.2%

They are trying to present a new unemployment metric as more reasonable, but throughout the article only give 2 data points making it impossible to judge except from prior bias.

Yup. Some other ways to read the headline are "Nearly 25% are unemployed according to a measure that has never not measured that nearly 25% are unemployed" or "Nearly 25% are unemployed according to a measure that could have been at 2% or 98% until December 2025. We didn't check any farther back than that."

Well, that explains some things. It explains why the employment statistics look good, but so many people are not making it.

On a recent APM Marketplace episode, they talked to several people who have been unemployed for over a year and that this metric isn’t captured anywhere.

The metrics are not reflecting reality, while being used to justify not using aggressive intervention to improve.

Krugman famously claimed that the CPI becomes more useful when you remove food, energy, cars and fuel from it. There seems to be some foundational philosophical issues with deciding what the field of economics is supposed to accomplish.

That's not the cost of living, then. It's the "cost of starving and/or freezing to death while not going anywhere". Like that's a number we care about.

But I suspect that Krugman's point (even if he expressed it badly) is that food, energy, and fuel are more noisy - more seasonal, but also have more noise in other ways. Well, if you want an early warning of which direction the economy is going, you don't want the noise, because if you mistake it for signal, you're going to be misled. So an economist may well find such a number more useful.

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