^^^

The “unemployment rate” is deliberate obfuscation, and a great example of papering over complexity by defining a metric with a stunningly dubious definition and giving it a name that makes it SOUND like it measures something it doesn’t.

- All of what @justsomeantifas expressed is true; that gets re-labeled “underemployment” and thus ascribed out of this metric. People in those positions can even still be actively interviewing for new jobs in their field and not be called unemployed cause they push carts at Walmart.

- Also, note that it’s not “jobs which pay well enough to live on”, it’s just strictly “employment”. If you sign a contract where I will schedule you for 1hr a week and pay you $3 “”“ + tips”“” for it; YOU ARE NOW EMPLOYED. The fact you’re bound to starve and die if that’s your only income is irrelevant.

- in addition, they create a whole new category, “discouraged”, into which they put anybody who had been ‘unemployed’ for ‘too long’. So even if you don’t ever take a 1hr/week, nominally-nonzero-pay, short term contract gig, after a while you’re magically no longer “unemployed”.

- there’s many additional missing aspects. If you are self-employed, you are “unemployed”, regardless of income as long as you aren’t reporting payroll numbers (roughly, as long as you aren’t paying others with a salary). If you are legally recognized as disabled, you Don’t ever count as unemployed, but can count as not-unemployed. If your place of work is informal or not legally condoned, no matter the size of the organization, you’re unemployed. Whether you’re constantly interviewing/applying to jobs, i.e. DOING THE ACTUAL BEHAVIOR OF LOOKING FOR A JOB, is irrelevant to whether you’re considered unemployed. If you’re a “full-time student”, you Don’t count as unemployed- but again, you can count as not-unemployed if you’re, say, working a part time job with a company.

So they have this metric that has no meaningful connection to a) whether people do not have a suitable job that meets their needs and b) whether people are actively attempting to secure a new job, and what do they claim is the “short” definition of the ‘unemployment rate’?

“Unemployed people are without work and are actively seeking employment.”

This is not the behavior of a field remotely concerned with accurately understanding reality. This is perfectly characteristic of an example I’d see in a book titled “How to Lie with Statistics”. It is actively misinforming with word selection that delicately dances around actual, perfectly reasonable expectations.

It’s a lie, fabricated in service of the richs’ attempts to justify the horrors taking place, expressed as a number to appear scientific.