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That metric is so gamed it doesn’t even make sense. If you’ve been out of work for 6 months (or is it 12) you just fall off the metric. So the entire homeless p

That metric is so gamed it doesn’t even make sense. If you’ve been out of work for 6 months (or is it 12) you just fall off the metric. So the entire homeless population of the US is not counted as unemployed. That’s been baked into the metric for decades and they have only gotten more discriminatory as to who counts as unemployed since.

forgotmypasswor 29d ago
Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.
- manlymuppet 29d ago
  As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term. In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.
manlymuppet 29d ago
There’s no duration for when you’re counted out of the labor force; only when you stop looking for work. Your incentivized to report your looking for work (and provide proof) to get unemployment benefits, and those who opt out of such benefits for more than 4 weeks are not counted as part of the labor force. I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic. And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help. Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.
- ab5tract 26d ago
  Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports? It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.
  - manlymuppet 26d ago
    The unemployment problem is about people looking for a job and not being able to find one. If someone doesn’t even want a job though, that’s not something you can “fix” anymore. To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try to find jobs for people who don’t want them? It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just aren’t looking for jobs at the moment—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need/want to work. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.) The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful. To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste. I bring this up because there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you paint them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.
    - ab5tract 26d ago
      They use U3 because it makes them look better and since no one is using the more accurate U6, there is no pressure to stop cooking their books. Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.

forgotmypasswor 29d ago

Didn't we have negative unemployment rate sometime during or right after COVID? I remember people talking about how gamed and disconnected from reality these numbers were because (I think) a bunch of people stopped looking for work or filing for unemployment and were dropped from the labor force for official statistics. It really messed up the models being used.

manlymuppet 29d ago
As far as I understand, that’s (negative unemployment) not possible with the way the statistic is measured. I might be confused though as I’ve never heard of the term. In any case, COVID was a hellish time for pretty much every economic metric, but for unemployment specifically, the catastrophe didn’t actually end up lasting that long, and the labor market in the U.S. has recovered remarkably well.

manlymuppet 29d ago

There’s no duration for when you’re counted out of the labor force; only when you stop looking for work. Your incentivized to report your looking for work (and provide proof) to get unemployment benefits, and those who opt out of such benefits for more than 4 weeks are not counted as part of the labor force. I think that’s fair, since even if you are homeless, as long you’re receiving unemployment benefits, you count as part of the statistic. And there’s good reason to count certain people out of the labor force. Retired folks, stay-at-home parents, anybody else that’s willfully unemployed—if your working in or around government trying to make labor policy decisions, including these people gives you an inaccurate picture of the labor market. If you want to help people get jobs, you need to focus on the people that actually need help. Of course no statistic is perfect, but broadly, I think that the unemployment rate is a useful and accurate measure. If you think otherwise, I’d invite you to propose a good alternative.

ab5tract 26d ago
Are you seriously implying that removing people from “unemployed” status after 4 weeks of not submitting a job application is not a deliberate gaming of the statistic in favor of having better job reports? It’s not on me to invent a new statistic. It is on me to push back on ridiculous claims that minimize the fact that this statistic has been defanged over and over again in the decades since it was first introduced.
- manlymuppet 26d ago
  The unemployment problem is about people looking for a job and not being able to find one. If someone doesn’t even want a job though, that’s not something you can “fix” anymore. To include people who don’t want to be employed in the labor force is counter-productive, since why would you try to find jobs for people who don’t want them? It’s not even that these people are “lazy” like many who (wrongly) disparage the unemployed say. They just aren’t looking for jobs at the moment—stay at home parents, retired people, anybody that doesn’t need/want to work. (And by the way, plenty of homeless people receive unemployment benefits and are therefore included in the statistic.) The unemployment rate is useful because it helps us see how many people need jobs. If you start including people who don’t need jobs, the metric just becomes less useful. To your other point, I’m not asking you to invent a new statistic. It’s just that when people say one metric isn’t working, someone smart usually has come up with alternatives. A lot of people for example don’t like using GDP, and thus economists have come up with HDI, GNI weighted GDP, or whatever else suits their taste. I bring this up because there are few alternatives to unemployment metrics, simply because they are not nearly as problematic as you paint them to be. Practically every competent government on Earth uses the same measures for unemployment, and specifying the labor force to only people actively looking for work is very standard; if you want to say that this nearly ubiquitous method is wrong, I think it’s reasonable to ask what needs to be fixed.
  - ab5tract 26d ago
    They use U3 because it makes them look better and since no one is using the more accurate U6, there is no pressure to stop cooking their books. Edit: only people who are homeless for less than six months would be on unemployment benefits. That doesn’t sound like “plenty” to me.