Yes, unemployment is 1 - employed / (employed + looking for work), "looking for work" is really hard to measure objectively (changing a word or order of words

Yes, unemployment is 1 - employed / (employed + looking for work), "looking for work" is really hard to measure objectively (changing a word or order of words in the question asked in the survey change it by quite a bit). employed in a given group / total population of a given group is more objective. There's still a bit of hacking of this one with for example "non institutionalized population" excluding people in jail (not negligible in the USA) https://www.census.gov/glossary/#term_Civiliannoninstitutionalizedpopulation https://www.census.gov/glossary/#term_Civiliannoninstitution... What baffles me is that there's no deep study of the "inactive" population, while the number of inactive has been raising continously for a few decades now in the USA, yellow line here: http://guerby.org/images/bls-men-25-54-200912.png http://guerby.org/images/bls-men-25-54-200912.png Understanding what the inactive are doing is probably key to understand current time (un)employment.