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Comment by hirako2000 | Hacker News Reader

hirako2000

I'm asking how come is that not a revelation, your answer is primarily that it's fallacious numbers for the headline.

You may be right, but reality is the majority of people take the official unemployment rate without even understanding what qualifies as unemployed.

Even commenters on hackernews, that I would say are far from being the least educated in the U.S are asking, despite the article explaining it, what counts as unemployed.

The article is educational, and revealing. What we make of it is up to us, if you deem the less than 10% employment rate more accurate, you are free to believe that. Even when it defies the common sense of many.

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It’s not revealing at all because unemployment numbers are directional and only useful in terms of comparison to prior years. The actual headline number is arbitrary and pretty much any metric you want to track already exists but is less popular. The only thing that matters is the methodology stays the same over the long term.

It might be educational to some, but this has been political rage bait since I became politically aware enough to listen to news, talk radio, etc going back to the 90s. It’s always been a favorite talking point for certain types.

Switch to using U-6 if it makes you feel better about the headline number making sense. U-3 has always been very clear over what the number is tracking and the methodology is quite well understood.

For comparative tracking we do need to stick to the same criteria, I'm with you.

I also agree some political factions, in particular those not in control, favour higher numbers. Those in place would rather minimise it.

The stance to use criteria that exclude people who would gladly work, if decent opportunities were available to them, to me is dishonest.

I don't know if the numbers this article proposes, based on a very inclusive criteria is more honest, but at least it tells us what the ratio looks like if we included more segments. Nobody would argue against the fact a good part is effectively not working, thus technically "unemployed".

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