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One problem is that "unemployment rate" is a technical term that does not match the colloquial / folk understanding. "There is a 5% unemployment rate" and "25%
by defen 10y ago
One problem is that "unemployment rate" is a technical term that does not match the colloquial / folk understanding. "There is a 5% unemployment rate" and "25% of working-age adults do not have a job" are not mutually inconsistent statements. So if you "know" that more than 5% of people are not working but you keep hearing about the low unemployment rate (and multiply that by 10s or hundreds of other little things like that), it's not hard to make the jump to "the government is lying to us"
- Gibbon1 10y agoOr more that the statistics trumpeted by policy makers do not match people personal observations. AKA Politicians and Policy makers and the federal reserve are pointing to a low U3 and slight wage increases to justify raising interest rates. And yet they totally ignore the employment to population rate, and ignore very long time it takes unemployed people to find another job.
- TheCoelacanth 10y agoYour example seems more like an example of people not having a consistent mental model of what words means. A typical person would probably say that "a working-age person without a job is unemployed" and "a full-time student or a stay-at-home mom or someone who retired early are not unemployed" are both true statements, but the two statements are contradictory. A statistician cannot possibly come up with a definition of unemployment that matches the colloquial understanding of what unemployment means.
- zigzigzag 10y agoOf course they can. They can report the unemployment rate as "percentage of the population physically capable of working who do not", and then provide other terms to refer to "people who are looking for a job but can't find one", maybe call it the jobseekers rate or something.