4 ms·

the unemployment rate dropped because more people left the workforce and became discouraged workers (a la haven't searched for work in the past 4 weeks).

• dragonwriter 10y ago
  > the unemployment rate dropped because more people left the workforce and became discouraged workers For the last monthly downtick, if you look at all the alternative measures [0], that's not the case. Actually, what you see is that the headline unemployment rate dropped, but the difference is mostly a shift from unemployed to working part time for economic reasons; discouraged workers have stayed about the same. > (a la haven't searched for work in the past 4 weeks). Discouraged workers are not "haven't searched for work in the past 4 weeks" its that subset of the marginally attached ("those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have looked for work sometime in the past 12 months") who "have given a job-market related reason for not currently looking for work." [0, again] [0] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm