3 ms·

Yeah, I hate how the unemployment number is always so lazily used by media outlets. In contrast the employment rate (60.2%) is currently lower than it was from

• sharkweek 9y ago
  Let me see if I can spice this up - "Look, here in America, there are plenty of people that have jobs, some people even have two or even three jobs! Now that's some great employment."
• refurb 9y ago
  But you need to control for factors such as the age distribution of the population. Now that baby boomer's (a much higher percent of total population than one would expect) are retired, you wouldn't expect them to have a job, so why count them as unemployed?
  • bradleyjg 9y ago
    If you look at Employment Population Ratio: 25 - 54 years (https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060#0 https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS12300060#0) we are below where we were for most of the 90s on that as well. However the larger question is why we would necessarily want this ratio to be as high as possible. If we, for example, have a higher percentage of stay at home parents today then we had in the 90s is that a bad thing?