280 ms·

True Rate of Unemployment

• kiln_ash 17d ago
  Always feels like the official numbers miss all the folks piecing together contract work just to get by. U6 is better, but still feels low.
• mc32 17d ago
  I don't see the revelation, it still appears we're near historical lows and it's not spiking. It's not like there is any divergence between before and now. It's not bad to know what this rate is but it's also not revealing a lie. If you apply their stat methodologies to other G-7, you get similar results.
  • gehwartzen 17d ago
    Just because the economic system we have has always been shitty for a high percentage of our neighbors doesn’t mean it always has to be that way. Other top economic countries being similar doesn’t excuse it.
    • Helloworldboy 17d ago
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    • Jblx2 17d ago
      If you do this with PPP with every other country on earth, which ones look the best?
  • hirako2000 17d ago
    The revelation is that the official unemployment rate is so skewed it is meaningless, even misleading since high unemployment is a serious social issue thus should be a high priority political concern.
    • reddozen 17d ago
      There is no revelation. The authors are intentionally misleading you by comparing 2 different metrics to pretend their formula is meaningfully different than what BLS provides. "Headline" unemployment rate is U-3 unemployment. If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match.
      • johnnyanmac 17d ago
        > If they compared "TRU" to it's analogous match U-6 the graph would be less striking as it's a 1:1 match. What do you mean? Outside of the COVID spike, I don't think U-6 ever comes anywhere close to 20%, which is lower than the lowest parameter in this TRU graph. IIRC, current U6 unemployment is roughly 8.7%.
      • hirako2000 17d ago
        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.
        • phil21 17d ago
          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.
• deleted 17d ago
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• skybrian 17d ago
  I see some odd effects. I wonder how these would be explained? According to the headline rate, unemployment was about the same in 1995. According to this alternative measure of unemployment, it's gone down by around 8% overall. When split by race, it's gone down the most for Hispanics. By education, it's gone down the most for people who didn't complete High School.
  • xeromal 17d ago
    Just a guess but gig work might be picking up some of that slack?
  • SpicyLemonZest 17d ago
    State level minimum wages were much less common in 1995, so it was easier for workers to be below their poverty threshold. Even though the federal wage got stuck, in many states today, the minimum wage is high enough that it's not possible for a full time worker to make less than $26,000 in a year.
• deleted 17d ago
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• ElProlactin 17d ago
  > ...or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes. I couldn't easily tell how they decided on a $26,000 "living wage" figure but in most of the US, even double that is not Easy Street. The "True Rate of Barely Getting By" is ridiculously high in the US from what I can gather.
  • BLKNSLVR 17d ago
    Might need to change the labelling from 'living' wage to 'surviving' wage.
  • bpodgursky 17d ago
    This number is before transfers, you really cannot just look at the raw income. A family of 2 adult 2 kid making $22,500 in raw income makes more like $48,700 after refundable tax credits, SNAP, housing, etc [1]. https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+transfers+for+26k+income&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOdIBCDgzODJqMGo3qAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&fbs=ABfTbFVyMZGZf1hfvX9uKjN_-G8cY2oODYyTyZk24Xz37_7FQ33TJTgGUSXMPMOdfjOY7e2Q30AopdyVXXfWdu5WnLoZpdMFWVURTY5I2n8dJLm7dR0vrPXatW3_GpGBwWsVmgDyXSroLXaj4nxeWEQNyufndIirE5sDOZkwfdjAF7oMKIEHiPeRgaTwcW1Qmzu2s-ykHlrY2kDc8gtmzWKMBoLosjtSQw&aep=10&ntc=1&sxsrf=APpeQntKu90ESlBbLl3OnociVYc4_Ky8cg%3A1788325544931&mstk=AUtExfDzg-FioWra-be8ype8wHuIqcwzhMuMoPwW8eJg5yWUHQ56TBLKabq-bHRS1bQ7IaLeOSw9TO9ONLTMfjiNfijOlQm9MBGVqo5fJpZYC-ZSPDSa0gXG56n-pmJ9Pzq9zflvaooxRl8LRl8JkEpfXStuNQPrMbAzXgC49xWzF9E08CQP13JKMI5BZUTxq5nDCXM7cLN3YEUpwK_lrJD0IXH_cwjj0Uj6KVRzBb6oRQY_LQnD-FSVh__Cd4771yGqqPGdtFmq_5vXmQ&aioh=3&csuir=1&cs=0&ccb=1&hl=en-US&biw=1728&bih=963&udm=50&atvm=2&mtid=z66Xat3xGqinptQP-vKwkAM https://www.google.com/search?q=average+us+income+including+...
    • ElProlactin 17d ago
      Take a step back. A family of 4 with $22,500 in income is well below the poverty line in the US, which is ~$33,000/year. But do you think a family of 2 adults and 2 children with a "feels like" income of $50,000 is still not scraping by in the US? That's basic survival at best.
      • 17d ago
• SpicyLemonZest 17d ago
  This definition sounds like U-6 unemployment (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/U6RATE) with an additional term for people making below a living wage. That's better constructed than most of these "real stats" I see, so I hate to be too critical. But they don't really engage with the important question of whether this metric is sufficiently robust for policymakers to use. Just eyeballing it, it seems to be quite a bit more volatile than the headline rate; if the Fed tried to target it, for example, would they end up doing a bunch of unnecessary rate cuts to stave off unemployment spikes that aren't real?
• runako 17d ago
  Anybody who believes ~30% of the workforce was functionally unemployed in 1999 does not know what those words mean, or was not an adult in 1999. I get what they are trying to convey, but the stronger message is the more straightforward: there are too many jobs that do not pay enough to live on.
  • seibelj 17d ago
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  • xbmcuser 17d ago
    For me the true problem which most countries dont even acknowledge is low wealth and capital gains tax. Salaries are not enough because of land prices and the prices inflation it causes through out the economy. You bring down price of home land rent then price of everything else comes down. And their is a lot more economic activity as trillions of dollars are not parked in real estate for wealth generation.
    • sandworm101 17d ago
      Or you tax it. Or, more correctly, you remove the current protections that allow land to appreciate tax-free for decades. That would move capital out of land and free it for other uses. The current system was designed to put money/people into houses post WWII but has gone too far in promoting radical multi-generational wealth structures. We already assess property each year for purposes of local property taxes. Treating a 10% rise in value as taxable income each year would shake up the real estate market. Speculative gentrification would certainly stop. And those sitting on empty houses would either sell or try to find renters.
      • rightnutwingjob 17d ago
        Taxing a rise in property value, an unrealised gain, doesn’t generate tax revenue as much as it results in getting the bastards voted out.
      • cpburns2009 16d ago
• wxw 17d ago
  > the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes Seems like reasonable criteria. "Regular" unemployment is # unemployed/# employed where unemployed is they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the prior four weeks, and are currently available to work. But not much criteria in terms of what work people are finding.
• RachelF 17d ago
  Similar statistics for Australia: https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemployment-estimates-march-2026 https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/10192-australian-unemploy... It all depends on the definition of "Unemployment". Most governments do not count you as unemployed if you've stopped looking for work, been unemployed for over 6 months, or if you made $25 as an Uber driver for 1 hour's work that month.
  • marcus_holmes 17d ago
    Thanks, this is interesting. Folks I've been talking to see a huge hit coming for us. Mining is getting automated (and coal/gas have huge problems). Education is getting hit by AI. Agriculture is good but employs relatively few people. Property is and always has been a zero-sum game that soaks up capital but doesn't return anything. Construction is getting pulled into building data centres for US hyperscalers. We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all - every attempt to do this (Turnbull's Ideas Boom being the classic) has failed. It's looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country.
    • defrost 17d ago
      > We don't seem to be able to differentiate our economy away from resources at all Or, equally importantly, control the means of production better than we've been doing to date - for a number of mineral resources and a great deal of energy we seem content with being tossed scraps in exchange for granting access for others to extract and sell on elsewhere. > looking pretty bleak for the Lucky Country. Pretty much as Donald Horne wrote when he popularised the saying for his book title.
      • marcus_holmes 17d ago
        To your point, the argument about the 20% Gas Export tax has been interesting. Fossil fuel lobbyists employed by foreign companies clearly and openly buying politicians to try and fend it off, when it's obviously in Australia's interests to implement it.
    • 16d ago
• zkmon 17d ago
  > the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job ... What is the "U.S. labor force" defined as? Is it a age group thing?
  • hirako2000 17d ago
    It is typically who is able to be part of the labour force. remove the elderly, those for who it would be illegal to work or still engaged in formal education, the so significantly handicapped no work is manageable. So it is an age group, with caveats.
    • HDThoreaun 17d ago
      You have to be looking for a job or employed to be part of the labor force count. Stay at home moms arent in the labor force, neither are students that dont want to work.
      • hirako2000 17d ago
        I agree moms who would not be able to work while raising babies/toddlers, or simply prefer not to, shouldn't count as members of the labor force. However. It is very difficult to determine what makes a mom employed vs not employed. Is that by choice/preference? or lack of opportunity. Or lack of qualification, or a combination. Coming up with statistics that distinguish the two is nearly impossible. The official rate does not only exclude moms who happen to be jobless. It excludes anyone hasn't been actively looking any more.
• j16sdiz 17d ago
  Looking at the "True Rate" vs "Headline Rate" graph.... The "Headline Rate" seems to be a good proxy for the "True Rate". As long as we are not comparing them in the absolute term, what's the problem?
  • riffraff 17d ago
    an unemployment rate of about 3-4% is considered "full employment" aka "we're good". If you switch the perspective to this other rates it shows there's a lot of work to do to reach "true full employment".
• rio517 17d ago
  While I struggle to see the value here, I dont trust the official numbers and applaud their efforts to come up with alternatives. However, I fear they conflate "living wage" with desire for full time work in this metric. It also seem to so closely track the official unemployment rate as to not be useful. Also, as others states, 26k is a surprisingly low number to be called a living wage. I think that number also varies depending on household make up, but I can see why they skipped that complexity.
• annzabelle 17d ago
  I have to wonder how much of this is "would like a full time job but has a part time job paying over 26k." Because of mandatory benefits (such as health insurance) for full time workers, a lot of companies only hire part time workers, but often people are making a living wage from those jobs. I'm not sure if a bartender making $50k+ (including untaxed tips) working 32.5 hours a week should count as unemployed.
  • deleted 17d ago
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  • Joel_Mckay 17d ago
    A lot of smaller companies over-hire part-time labor to minimize cost of overtime, medical benefit support, and mandatory wage increases. In general, employee-at-will and dependent-contractor status is only popular in the USA, and often is outright illegal for good reason in most other countries. Demand deficient labor is a stubborn macroeconomic problem, and when manufacturers hit artificial trade barriers a lot of folks simply get sent home off rotation... even though they technically are still employed. =3
  • iLoveOncall 17d ago
    Or simply people who have 2 part-time jobs totally 40 hours.
• luxshan_t 17d ago
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• floro 17d ago
  Everyone knows the stats are false but I don't know an alternative. I've been unemployed after graduating for a year and because I didn't use unemployment benefits I didn't show up in the statistics in switzerland. I know many cases like mine.
  • Joel_Mckay 17d ago
    It has been a rough year for those entering the job markets. However, I would suggest trying this service if you are willing to relocate for awhile. https://www.aerotek.com/en https://www.aerotek.com/en It is a firm that helped place a few friends over the years. Good luck =3
  • IanCal 17d ago
    I’d be surprised if that’s how they measure it, it’s a common misunderstanding in the UK that this is what the stat means.
    • stymaar 17d ago
      It's not uncommon to use that as a measurement in addition to the ILO's definition.
    • DrProtic 17d ago
      I my country you have to regularly check in with the bureau for unemployment to be included in the stats, even though that bureau hadn’t found a job for anyone ever. I assume that’s how it works in many other countries. Unemployed is the one actively looking for a job, not the one that’s just to working. At least that’s how governments seem to look at it, and their way of figuring out who’s looking is incorrect.
      • dfdydx 17d ago
        Where do you live? Most countries use labour force surveys, it's orthogonal to registration to unemployment agencies.
        • 17d ago
• m00x 17d ago
  How do they get data on people who work part time but want a full time job, and how do they calculate a living wage?
• dukodk 17d ago
  Something looks fishy when it’s just the other graph +20.
• xelxebar 17d ago
  From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. IMHO, this should be read as a campaign to improve and add precision to a political narrative more than an indictment of existing statistics. In particular, the BLS in the US reports 6 different measures of unemployment, U-1 through U-6, each measuring something slightly different. LISEP adds another to the bunch; this is their operationalization: > LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually. This annual wage is adjusted for inflation, calculated in January 2020 dollars. The white paper gives their rationale for the $20,000 cutoff. The "true" name here is marketing, which might honestly be the right play here. My gut says that we already have better statistics than TRU but they smell dry and academic. I would be interested to hear more about their political strategy and philosophy. FWIW, the institute looks to be chaired by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Ludwig.
  • em500 17d ago
    > From a cursory read of their white paper, my impression is that LISEP is trying to quantify the sense that making a livable income is harder and more disparate than it used to be. But their own defined measure shows the opposite. The first graph on their website shows that their True Rate is currently at its lowest level over the past 30 years.
    • tancop 17d ago
      The point is that it's still high and stagnating. And the living wage calculation is using a CPI adjusted fixed level, so inflation that's heavy on critical sectors for lower income people (housing, fuel, groceries) will show up less than the real damage it's causing. They set it up this way because TRU is a conservative measure designed to stand up to criticism. The true under-living-wage rate is probably even higher but that would depend on stronger assumptions that are easier to attack.
• moezd 17d ago
  Time series also show a slanted worldview that real unemployment was worse in 90s. Have they not adjusted for dollar inflation? 1999 is really suspicious: Normally at 30-40% unemployment you fear for public unrest and uprising, did I miss an important piece of world history there?
• jdw64 17d ago
  I am curious as to why the TRU is not adopted as a standard metric. 1.Corporations that sponsor scholars dislike it. 2.Politicians dislike it (because if TRU were adopted as the standard, the unemployment rate a critical metric for evaluating their political achievements—would drastically increase). 3.The current system fundamentally operates on legacy metrics, despite the widespread knowledge that they fail to accurately reflect reality. It seems to me that TRU captures reality much better, so I am wondering why it is not widely used as the standard.
• harlan_pdx 17d ago
  Know a few folks still looking for months after layoffs. The official numbers definitely feel rosier than the ground truth.
• afpx 17d ago
  Tangential question: how do you actually find and hire people? I have a decent amount of disposable income [1], and I often want to pay people to help with things I’m not particularly skilled at. The problem is that I have no idea how to reliably find the right person or even how to structure the arrangement once I do. I have lots of examples, but here’s a recent one. A device failed, and replacing it would have cost about $1,000. I watched some videos to see whether I could repair it myself, then spent probably ten hours researching and tinkering with it. I even bought some equipment. It was fun, but after I came close to bricking the thing, I eventually shelved it. Since I rarely use it anyway, it joined my ever-growing list of projects I’ll get back to someday. The first problem was discovery: how do you find someone with a niche skill who is actually interested in doing a relatively small job? The second problem was trust. I’ve been burned before by hiring companies based on Internet reviews. A lot of businesses seem to optimize for low-cost labor and throughput. The person who actually shows up has little incentive to care about quality, craftsmanship, or attention to detail. The third problem was knowledge transfer. Even if I found the right person, explaining the problem and exactly what I wanted might take half as much effort as just doing the work myself. And this isn’t really a new problem. Funny enough, in the 1990s I built supply chain sourcing systems. Essentially the same problem existed at a macro level: how do you efficiently match specialized demand with capable, trustworthy supply? I recently talked to someone doing similar work today, and apparently it's not close to being solved. So what do people actually do? [1] There’s an odd irony here: I’m also one of those people who would like to work but effectively can’t, at least under the current hiring system. I reached my financial goals in 2020. I was between jobs during the pandemic. I assumed I’d find another job fairly easily because my record was fairly impressive. What I wasn’t prepared for was how time-intensive and test-driven interviewing had become. I was over 40 (apparently a red flag), and I had little interest in competing in hustle-culture interview processes. After 5 failed interviews, it was just easier to live off my investments. Yet, I have way too much idle time.
  • anotherhue 17d ago
    Sounds like you want a capital-P Professional, but one who is willing (and permitted) to do direct consulting. That's pretty much lawyers and doctors, then nothing for about 80% of the distribution because those people are W2 and have neither the time nor the leeway to do solo consulting. Then you're into the ultra-specialist fields, at which point they have an agent. So I would say, you don't want to find a person, you want to find an agent who has such a person, and odds are starting fees are $5k going on $1M.
• Unified-Mentor 17d ago
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• shovepull 17d ago
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• BrtByte 17d ago
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• oytis 17d ago
  What's the point of bundling unemployment, low wages, and part-time employment (potentially with a high wage) together? They've come up with a big scary number, but it has been big and scary over the whole period of observation, so nothing particularly special is happening right now.
• yanjunnf 17d ago
  I am a software engineer and lost my job a week ago.
  • NamlchakKhandro 17d ago
    but are you a good software engineer?
    • Madmallard 17d ago
      Probably is. Unless you're the top 20% you're probably on the chopping block via RNG and sometimes just whole departments are getting sacked for 'automations'.
    • milkytron 15d ago
      From what I've observed, it likely doesn't matter. I worked at a company that laid off all senior engineers in a single layoff. I was let go and found another job within a month. I've heard of entire departments being let go because of shifting company priorities. I imagine decision makers aren't usually evaluating each person based on performance, they're looking at organizational priorities and budgets. I have some friends at the company I got let go of, and they are in shambles. Managers have reached out to me asking for me to rejoin. I'd be willing to bet they thought the juniors and mid levels would be able to take the place of seniors with the help of AI, without management fully understanding how AI should be utilized most effectively.
• iLoveOncall 17d ago
  > Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes. The fact that "does not have a full-time job" is accompanied by "but wants one", but "has no job" isn't shows how unserious this statistic is. So my 90 years old retired grandma is functionally unemployed? Same for my multimillionaire retired 50 years old uncle? Nonsense.
• stuaxo 17d ago
  A huge demonstration of why we need to move from a 5 day working week. Some of the gains that have gone to the top need to be paid to spread the work over more people, a 4 day week would be a start.
  • RivieraKid 17d ago
    In basic economic theory, high wages mean that there's insufficient supply. So I wonder why don't the "truly unemployed" people learn whatever the market rewards and compete with the highly paid workers. If it is because they can't for whatever reason, 4 day working week doesn't solve anything. (Genuine question, I'm not making some kind of a right-wing point.)
    • hhjinks 17d ago
      Because learning involves being effectively unemployed for multiple years, and is only available to those who did well in school. Then, on the other side, you're still not guaranteed a job. Add to all of that the fact that you'll probably have to move and effectively restart your life elsewhere. My fiancée is currently in the middle of this. I don't know if she would've been able to go through it alone.
      • RivieraKid 17d ago
        Yeah, makes sense that this would be part of the reason. But the question is whether a 4 day week is the right solution.
        • ahoka 17d ago
          People could use the fifth day to go to school.
    • sph 17d ago
      Yeah go ask a homeless person why don’t they become a hedge fund manager or neurosurgeon. Are they stupid?
• stuaxo 17d ago
  Next add in under employment to get a good picture of the state of the US.
• rspoerri 17d ago
  for me the most interesting aspect is that a bachelor degree makes you have a double chance of being employed vs having a high school/college degree and again double the chance vs having no high school degree. also it's interesting that these institutes still dont know how to do well understandable and intuitively readable graphs by not starting at a real reference point all thew time (not starting at 0, but sometimes at 20)!
  • Grombobulous 17d ago
    Yes, and that’s one of the things on this subject that has made me generally concerned about circulated social media opinions touting how college “isn’t worth it anymore,” not to mention right-wing education demonization. In reality, university education is still the best thing you can do for your lifetime earnings, even if you accumulate 6 figures of debt. You have to pick a horrendous major to make it a net negative (and even if you do that, you can probably just pivot to a job that is fine with “any bachelors degree.” It’s interesting how positive these graphs seem to be. The gender and race gaps in unemployment are narrowing. The overall underemployment/functional unemployment rate is the lowest it’s been since 1995. Maybe it’s a reminder not to listen to a small handful of loud voices (or maybe even voices of psyop campaigns) trying to tell you that the economy is terrible and that a massive recession is imminent. Sure, there are some products that are getting more expensive. That’s life. Get your raise. Stop doomscrolling. On that note, university education hasn’t gotten more expensive in a couple of decades, as universities are desperate to maintain enrollment figures.
• EdZitron2 17d ago
  168M employees / 340M people in the US. Means 51% unemployed people. Raw figures
  • cobbzilla 17d ago
    > Raw figures sure, for an upper bound. how many of those 340M people are actually employable? how many are children? how many are retired? permanently unable to work? subtract those out, it’s a better upper bound but still a swag then add in all the self-employed, your swag is a little better, still a swag your throwaway name is apt and funny
    • EdZitron3 17d ago
      That’s the point of raw figures. You are asking for not raw figures. But if you do the math and subtract out another 75-100M it’s still very bad
  • wat10000 17d ago
    Only if you count my eight year old as “unemployed.”
    • FoundAnotherOne 16d ago
      [flagged]
      • wat10000 16d ago
        > Means 51% unemployed people. I replied to what I replied to. You made a statement. Your statement is only true if my eight year old counts as unemployed. Where's the problem?
• marginalia_nu 17d ago
  Why is the y-axis not starting at 0% for all measures? Seems like they're attempting to exaggerate the race and gender differences, even though they'd be perfectly obvious even with a fair graph. Real credibility own-goal, especially given the topic at discussion. --edit-- Top of the range is also varying between each graph, smaller issue but still ... weird. If you're trying to accurately convey percentages, this is not the way to do it.
  • aDyslecticCrow 17d ago
    Gah! the first two graphs were fair so i dropped me guard. Ye this piss me off.
  • VimEscapeArtist 17d ago
    "There are three degrees or classes of lies: there are lies, damned lies and statistics" :D
  • a3w 17d ago
    > exaggerate the ethnicity and gender differences They call that race and sex, but probably mean gender, not sex. And there is no such thing as race, see wikipedia. Are those even social scientists?
    • marginalia_nu 17d ago
      The races, as seen in american sociology have a socioeconomic and historical reality which makes them interesting to track regardless. The racial segregation laws of the past were real, and this has had consequences that are still very real regardless whether the race concept is used correctly in a biological sense.
  • euroderf 17d ago
    > Why is the y-axis not starting at 0% for all measures? Honestly, look at the graphs you see today. Nobody starts at zero any more, with the two stacked tildes interrupting the vertical axis to indicate an omitted range. I imagine this bad habit started in the 90s when no affordable/free graphing software had the feature. Then it fossilised into graphing ineptitude.
• LowIQJews 17d ago
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• helsinkiandrew 17d ago
  > True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes. I find it odd to use both an hourly specification (>35+ hours) and a minimum $ amount. What about those who are following Tim Ferris dream and are pulling in $100Ks in a 5-hour week?
  • pm215 17d ago
    This is just unfortunate ambiguous phrasing -- Tim Ferris (and anybody else happy on part time hours rather than taking a part time job because they can't find a full time job) doesn't get counted because they don't match the "and wants one" qualifier. The white paper states the definition more precisely: "LISEP’s definition of “True” employment or unemployment accepts the U-3 rate for comparison purposes, but modifies it by adopting two important stipulations. The first stipulation deals with the workweek. To be employed for the purposes of LISEP’s true employment concept, an individual must either have a full-time job (35+ hours per week) or have a part-time job but no desire to be full-time (e.g., students). The second stipulation is that an individual must earn at least $20,000 annually."
• andai 17d ago
  I'm pretty confused here. The graph implies unemployment is among the lowest it's been in decades? Is that right? Also where does the discrepancy come from? That's a huge difference (5x!) with the official stat! Is this actually measuring "underemployment", i.e. people who wish they were working full time but are stuck with some bullshit jobs? (And by bullshit I don't mean what Graeber means, but "this pays like crap and melts my brain but I can't find anything better.")
  • pas 17d ago
    > Is this actually measuring "underemployment" Sort of. It's "all of the above". So basically low demand for labor. * Looking for a job. * People who don't work full time but want to. * Poverty wages. (below $26,000 (in 2025 dollars) annually before taxes)
• wat10000 17d ago
  This stuff drives me nuts. Everybody’s like “omg did you know that the unemployment rate doesn’t count people who stopped looking for work?!” Yes, I did know that, from the ten thousand times people said the same thing before you did. I also know it because I can read and BLS is completely up front about how their numbers are calculated. There isn’t even a single official rate. They put out six different numbers that mean different things. I totally get it if people decide that one of those six numbers are the measure they want, and come up with something they think is better. But why does it always have to be framed as, they’re lying to you? Can you not advocate for your technique without turning it into another stupid conspiracy theory?
  • 8note 16d ago
    > But why does it always have to be framed as, they’re lying to you? the most obvious answer is that the not-included groups are usually not reported, and when general media and politicians repeat the numbers, they are treated as gospel rather than with nuance. sure, you know that the "unemployment" number has little to do with employment at all and its a name just as good as "the orange number" but most people who talk about "the unemployment rate" actually treat it as if its unambiguously the unemployment rate.
    • wat10000 16d ago
      I suppose that makes sense when "they" is politicians and media. It's just weird that pretty much nobody mentions the other official numbers. Politicians/media tend to talk about "the" number, but then so do people like the organization linked here. It's so rare to see anyone saying, "the" number you read about is pretty limited, there are five other official numbers that may be more informative, here's what they mean.
• insane_dreamer 16d ago
  I appreciate the intent but I think they have to break that rate down further for it to mean anything to readers. - employed full-time but earning < living wage - employed part-time and earning < living wage - not employed but no longer needing employment (supported some other way, spouse, parents, etc.) - not employed and no longer seeking work (gave up because no jobs) - not employed and actively seeking work ...
• fithisux 16d ago
  For Greece the headline unemployment is on average 9 percent. However it is at least 50 because in Greece there is another trick. People unemployed more than 2 years, are erased from unemployment rate as inactive, not belonging to able to work population.