3 ms·
Did you read the article? > Broader measures of unemployment tell the same story. The so-called U-6 rate, which captures people who are working part-time but w
by mrbabbage 9y ago
Did you read the article?
> Broader measures of unemployment tell the same story. The so-called U-6 rate, which captures people who are working part-time but want a full-time job, and those who would like a job but have given up looking out of frustration, is also back down to its level before the last recession. It fell to 8.6 percent in April from 8.9 percent, and the last time it was lower was November 2007.
- notacoward 9y agoYes, but does a U-6 level of 8.6% constitute "full employment"? According to the technical definition they're unrelated. Less formally, 8.6% unemployed, underemployed, or discouraged seems quite a bit short of full anything. Pointing out flaws in the original definition or terminology in no way implies that the GP hadn't read the article, and the suggestion to prefer labor force participation is a good one.
- dragonwriter 9y ago"Full employment" is a technical term that means no cyclical unemployment; it can involve arbitrarily large quantities of non-cyclical, e.g., frictional and, more to the point, structural (mismatch between skills and demand) unemployment. It seems intuitively likely to me that structural unemployment is becoming a bigger problem (and that structural rather than cyclical factors are an increasing factor in discouraged workers.) "Full employment" doesn't mean no employment problems, it just means that the problems are non-cyclical.