I understand the need to exclude the young, old, disabled, and homemakers but why do unemployment statistics not include those who are simply living off of welfare and not intending to work (or on the opposite end of the spectrum, those living off of a trust fund)? Is this subset of the population just not big enough to be worth including in the statistics?
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Very few statistics are measured and calculated just because we’re curious about them. Most things we measure are measured for some purpose or with some goal in mind. Unemployment statistics are measured with the goal of understanding what economic and wider sociopolitical factors cause it to go up and down, and hopefully why. Some team of eggheads decided that measuring people who are incapable of working, or who refuse to work in any circumstances, didn’t serve that goal and only clouded the data. At this point we continue with those methods because we’re performing huge longitudinal studies, as well as short term studies, and measuring different things at different points in your 100 years of ongoing research makes your data useless to compare.
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