I think what's going on is, we're having period of high inflation. Here's my theorey: this high inflation is effectively lowering the minimum wage level because minimum wage isn't keeping pace with the real rate of inflation. and because minimum wage is decreasing in real terms, this opens up lots of new positions that were made illegal by minimum wage. and so more and more people are finding jobs at the low end of the spectrum just above minimum wage and it's why the official reported Unemployment rates are so low and yet we have one hell of a sluggish economy.
Conclusion: the low official Unemployment rates are not a reflection of a healthy economy, they are a reflection of decreasing minimum wages.
The rates in that article are absolutely eye popping. I don’t understand their methods but I can say the charts align with what I witness.
This is a valuable way of looking at employment in the US. Unfortunately in the current political climate this will probably be immediately weaponized instead of getting the nuanced discussion that it deserves.
Then you scroll down to their time series showing "True Unemployment" is at historic lows
For some purposes, this one (which covers everyone 16+, even those who don't want to work) is more informative:
If this data is correct, then ONE THIRD of the population was unemployed in 1995. Is this reasonable?
Also, why include people with no jobs? That would include stay-at-home parents and even FIRE folks that retired early
There's no way the "true rate of unemployment" has been declining since 1995.
I am not an economist but I do follow economic policies, usually in the form of blogs written by economists such as Noah Smith, Greg Mankiw, et al.
I will leave this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/badeconomics/comments/jd3p0l/axios_...
to show why LISEP's measure of unemployment is problematic. I haven't had chance to look at the methodology for this particular piece but I suspect it's also got few holes/unmentioned bias in there (as so many of these think-tanks do).
BLS also has different measures of unemployment (see: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm) and what LISEP is citing as "headline unemployment" is U3. Not all metrics are perfect and I think it's important to understand the methodology and the nuances of how to apply these different metrics.
This is a decent metric, my only problem with it is calling it the 'True' rate, implying that the other measures are 'False'.
If they called the LISEP unemployment rate, I'd be happy :)
>Using data compiled by the federal government’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, the True Rate of Unemployment tracks the percentage of the U.S. labor force that does not have a full-time job (35+ hours a week) but wants one, has no job, or does not earn a living wage, conservatively pegged at $25,000 annually before taxes.
So many discussions online about unemployment take a framing like this, implying not so subtly that the government is lying about what unemployment _actually_ is. But the feds are publishing all of this data and being transparent about it. Nothing about having some arbitrary cap at salaries below 25,000 make this a “truer” metric.