True. In the long term, these alternate definitions don't correlate. Long term "discouragement" is one that comes up relatively often because it can relate to

True. In the long term, these alternate definitions don't correlate. Long term "discouragement" is one that comes up relatively often because it can relate to political hot topics. Even more interesting (to me) are some long term trends that are outside of most unemployment debates. Eg (1) The long term implications are more about demography than economics, societal age structures and such. (2)The biggest mover of the last couple of generations has been women's employment. The employee pool basically skyrocketed. Employment/unemployment rates have not been overly impacted by this rapid increase in labour supply. This is still happening. The pool of experienced, female 58 year old lawyers is impacted by the norms/trends if the 80s. I think this shows how much flexibility the employment system has. Aggregating encourages us to think of demand for labour in macro (kind of Keynesian) terms. I think the truth is that demand for marginal labour (the difference between 4% and 8% in traditional/official unemployment measures) is different to the general demand. In other words, some portion of the population (different individuals at different times) is harder to employ. That doesn't mean it will look struggle to employ a different pool. If we had another gender to liberate, I think the market could probably absorb it regardless of without impacting unemployment rates very much.