Why do unemployment statistics only count people who want to work and not the actual number of unemployed people?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

There are six official unemployment metrics in the US called, creatively, U-1 though U-6. They include more and more people as the number increases, and U-6 probably corresponds more closely to what you’re looking for. The so-called headline number that is frequently reported in the media is U-3, because it generally gauges the ease of finding a job if you’re looking, but there’s a lot of criticism of it, particularly for excluding discouraged job-seekers.

But you can generally find the U-6 number in most articles when the monthly unemployment numbers are released (typically the first Friday of each month), and they are posted in a pretty great format on r/economics.

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