This is precisely it. (Employed / seeking employment) is the U3 employment rate - it's a perfectly legitimate statistic for understanding how the job search is

This is precisely it. (Employed / seeking employment) is the U3 employment rate - it's a perfectly legitimate statistic for understanding how the job search is going. When economists want to count the temporarily discouaged, they use U4. And when they want to count those not working for other reasons, they use U5. It's annoying that we treat U3 as "the unemployment rate" for political discourse, but it's a perfectly reasonable metric for economic analysis, and I wish people would stop pretending it's some kind of trick.