I completely agree, and reports on unemployment rates are one of my biggest Internet peeves: "The official unemployment rate is artificially depressed by exclu

I completely agree, and reports on unemployment rates are one of my biggest Internet peeves: "The official unemployment rate is artificially depressed by excluding people who might be earning only a few dollars a week." This reads like paranoia. Regardless of how U-3 originated, U-3 reflects an international standard of defining "unemployment". If different countries use different definitions of unemployment in their studies, then meaningfully comparing unemployment statistics among countries is futile (or just really really difficult). I guess one could argue that, say, U-6 should be the international standard. But whatever definition one uses doesn't actually change anything in the real world. The different measures are trying to describe reality, not define the magical all-true unemployment rate. The point is to look at many different definitions to identify trends. Attempts to blindly point at U-6 and say that this is more "real" than U-3 is just as deceptive as claiming success over lowering the U-3 rate (even if it's because people are leaving the labor force). It should be up to outlets like Axios to explain these nuances rather than argue that one measure is more "true" than another.