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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With statistics it’s always useful to ask “why do we want to know this? What is it meant to tell us?”
Unemployment is a measure of people looking for work who can’t find it.
This is a bad thing for those people. Mostly because many of these people will be in financial trouble because they don’t have a job to earn money. Even if they are financially comfortable, they still haven’t been able to get something they want.
So we want to reduce unemployment because it’s a bad thing for people
If people aren’t looking for work then unemployment isn’t a bad thing for them – at least, that’s an assumption that’s made (how true it is up for debate).
From another perspective, people looking for work are available to the labour market. The more people who are looking for work, the easier it will be for companies to recruit and the lower the wages they can offer.
People who aren’t looking for work aren’t really relevant to that – well not unless they get a *really* good job offer. (But then you might as well include retired people, homemakers, etc..)
So it’s not that these groups aren’t interesting. Although they are probably a small number, depending on who you’re counting as “living off welfare” and the welfare provision in the country you’re looking at (and maybe some tiny, really rich countries have lots of people living off trust funds, savings and the like). They’re excluded because of the what “unemployment” figures are usually used to show.
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