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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To make matters more complex, there are also “underemployed,” those working part time but who want full time, “self employed,” who may or may not earn income this or that month, and the entire “dark economy” of undocumented people who may contribute to social and economic stresses of unemployment in a neighbourhood but are not counted anywhere.
There’s no point, is there? The unemployment rate’s role is a wind gauge of the supply of labor vs the demand for labor. If someone has decided not to contribute to the supply, for whatever reason, it’s not helpful to the data set or our understanding of the economy to include them. You’ve already conceded that 90% of the unemployed and not looking make sense to exclude, why include the remaining 10% who aren’t elderly/disabled/underage/homemaking?
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.
Two big reasons: it’s actually tricky to accurately quantify the number of unemployed people that could technically work if they wanted to and it’s politically disadvantageous to be truthful about this number.
Same with inflation. It’s tough to really quantify and the government has no incentive to be honest about it anyway, so you get convoluted calculations that exclude a ton of important variables until they can massage the number down to something they like.
The unemployment rate in the US is WAY higher than the 2.1% or so they’re claiming. Inflation is also WAY higher than the 9.1% they’re claiming.
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