Unemployment is essentially meaningless as a metric because deciding the nature of "unemployment" is gameable. What would be more interesting, is something lik

Unemployment is essentially meaningless as a metric because deciding the nature of "unemployment" is gameable. What would be more interesting, is something like the percentage of adult individuals with an income lower than some amount (e.g. in the UK, 14.5K would approximate to a full time job at minimum wage, so you could use 12-13K or something). Still not perfect (stay at home partners would be problematic, for one example, and you can game the line, though it'd be more transparent) but it'd be far more in line with what I'd call "unemployed". I don't believe that "voluntary unemployment" is really a thing that cannot be accounted for numerically. If someone has significant unearned investment income, or are obviously attempting to start a business, sure, exclude them. A poor person who's given up looking for a job is just unemployed.