This is a significant, but it's not an unknown issue. Any economist working in anything tangentially related would know that there are a variety of unemployment

This is a significant, but it's not an unknown issue. Any economist working in anything tangentially related would know that there are a variety of unemployment statistics (U1, U2, ... U6, helpfully ordered by size). It's not that the people working in the space don't know what's going on, it's that U1 is publicized when U5 or maybe U6 would better match the intuitive definition of unemployment. It's purely a PR issue, and it won't be solved because no administration wants to oversee a "massive jump in unemployment" that will be complicated to explain. (The numerator is the same in every statistic, denominator changes. There are sensical reasons statistics that exclude some types of people from the denominator are useful. For example, often you don't want to count college students without a job amoung the unemployed if they aren't looking for one. See https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm for more info.)