wrote:
Brent P wrote:
In article , krw wrote:

No, it's the number of people

looking_for_employment/employed+looking_for_employment

If you aren't seeking employment you are *NOT* counted as
unemployed. ...seems to make sense to me!
It's not that simple. The formula is political and for instance does not
include people who have run out of unemployment benefits but are still
seeking employment.

You continue to demonstrate your total ignorance. People who's
unemployment benefits have run out are most certainly included in the
unemployment rate. And the unemployment benefit list is not even used
as part of the data collection, period. The unemployment rate is
calculated by a random survey of households, precisely to avoid the
problem above, which you falsely claim exists. Basicly, the survey
determines who has a job and who does not, but is looking for one.

Exactly right. In my own direct response to the little
sophomore, I posted the relevant material from the BLS
site that describes the methodology. The link is
http://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm, and the page is
entitled How the Government Measures Unemployment. It
states at the top that the underlying official document
was published in March 1994, and the procedures
followed are as of July 2001, but not much has changed.

You have to understand that the little sophomore,
Brent, is *ideologically* driven to claim that
unemployment statistics "don't fully capture" the true
numbers. He's *always* going to be ****ing and moaning
about underemployment (which is really a separate
issue), people who have given up looking for work,
etc., but *he* has absolutely no idea of the extent of
either of those; that is, he has no methodology *at
all*, just his idle and ideologically motivated conjecture.

Most often, you hear and read the comments of little
sophomores like Brent when a drop in the unemployment
rate is announced. Month on month, for months on end,
a drop in the unemployment rate is announced...and the
ideologically driven sophomores like Brent react, every
month, as if the "real" rate actually rose.



And only a nitwit would claim that the data collection and rate
calculation are "political", because the process is fair, reasonable
and has been done for decades, regardless of which party is in power.

And the perennial sophomore cannot identify EVEN ONE
modification to the methodology that he can
legitimately say was "politically motivated". He
merely asserts them, without evidence.


But why worry about the "rate", at all. Since you refuse to
acknowledge that economic statistics, like national debt or budget
deficit, need to be compared to anything relevant, you should simply
be arguing absolutes. There are more unemployed today than 100
years ago, so it's very, very, bad.






It counts people who accepted jobs that pay a small
fraction of what they used to make because their unemployment ran out but
are still looking as employed. There are a bunch more if-then-elses but
you can find those on your own time.