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Yes, 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, under
by notacoward 10y ago
Yes, 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 10y 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.