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I thought "economic unemployment" is defined by the people who seek a job while not having a current one. People who do not seek a job aren't counted. It's been

I thought "economic unemployment" is defined by the people who seek a job while not having a current one. People who do not seek a job aren't counted. It's been a very long while since the economy classes though.

lend000 9y ago
That's just how the US Bureau of Labor defines it, allowing elected officials to make the economy seem better than it is.
jldugger 9y ago
Which is a simple thing to look at when you're in a first world country with a functioning Unemployment Insurance office you can query to count such things. When you try to map that into different cultures and economic development statuses, it gets far fuzzier.
nostrademons 9y ago
...how do you define "seek a job" in a place where the concept of full-time employment is alien? Therein lies the rub. If you dig into the stats, the 10% unemployment rate quoted in official government statistics - and measured accordingly to the methodology economists usually use, excluding people who have "given up on searching for a job - is based on a definition of "job" where they have worked (in cash or in kind) for at least one hour in the past week. By those stats, 50% of the country was not in the labor force, 45% was "employed" (for at least one hour a week), 5% was actively unemployed. But then when you dig further, 75% of those classified as "employed" didn't receive any payment for their work. They bartered. So now we're looking at 12.5% employment. And 84% of those employed worked in the informal sector, i.e. maybe they did a couple hours of labor for another villager. Considering the large overlap between the bartering & informal sectors, we're at around 5% full-time employment in the country. That shows the difficulty in applying models built for an industrial economy to regions that still primarily function on an agrarian economy. The definitions they use are nonsensical - they don't apply to how people qualitatively work. (There're similar difficulties applying models made for industrial economies to post-industrial economies - how do you classify someone who drives for Uber & Lyft at the same time while AirBnBing out their house, doing Instacart runs, running an Amazon import-export business over the Internet, trading in Bitcoin, and selling stuff on Etsy? Is that 0, 1, or 7 jobs? Are they a financier or taxicab driver?)
- gowld 9y ago
  a more sensible approach is counting how many people maintain a certain standard of living (determined by local or global metrics, whatever you are interested in) without relying on government assistance or charity.

lend000 9y ago

That's just how the US Bureau of Labor defines it, allowing elected officials to make the economy seem better than it is.

jldugger 9y ago

Which is a simple thing to look at when you're in a first world country with a functioning Unemployment Insurance office you can query to count such things. When you try to map that into different cultures and economic development statuses, it gets far fuzzier.

nostrademons 9y ago

...how do you define "seek a job" in a place where the concept of full-time employment is alien? Therein lies the rub. If you dig into the stats, the 10% unemployment rate quoted in official government statistics - and measured accordingly to the methodology economists usually use, excluding people who have "given up on searching for a job - is based on a definition of "job" where they have worked (in cash or in kind) for at least one hour in the past week. By those stats, 50% of the country was not in the labor force, 45% was "employed" (for at least one hour a week), 5% was actively unemployed. But then when you dig further, 75% of those classified as "employed" didn't receive any payment for their work. They bartered. So now we're looking at 12.5% employment. And 84% of those employed worked in the informal sector, i.e. maybe they did a couple hours of labor for another villager. Considering the large overlap between the bartering & informal sectors, we're at around 5% full-time employment in the country. That shows the difficulty in applying models built for an industrial economy to regions that still primarily function on an agrarian economy. The definitions they use are nonsensical - they don't apply to how people qualitatively work. (There're similar difficulties applying models made for industrial economies to post-industrial economies - how do you classify someone who drives for Uber & Lyft at the same time while AirBnBing out their house, doing Instacart runs, running an Amazon import-export business over the Internet, trading in Bitcoin, and selling stuff on Etsy? Is that 0, 1, or 7 jobs? Are they a financier or taxicab driver?)

gowld 9y ago
a more sensible approach is counting how many people maintain a certain standard of living (determined by local or global metrics, whatever you are interested in) without relying on government assistance or charity.