Specifically, you are looking for various measures of "not in the labor force" -- called U1 through U6.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm

U6 is: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force

The national U6 right now is 9.2 (unadjusted).

Also worth noting that U-3 is an international definition of unemployment. If different countries use different definitions, then comparing rates among countries would be pretty much meaningless.

It says 8.6 on the page

dsr_ followed the column down a bit off and got the Feb 2017 seasonally adjusted number (they are one column apart) - they should really separate those better

They didn't stop, these folks have never been counted in U3, the most commonly cited measure of unemployment. BLS publishes multiple unemployment rates, six in fact, that capture different aspects of the issue: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bur...

To me, that makes sense regardless of how true your make (which I find suspect) may be.

A nation's unemployment rate should be a reflection of the economy's ability to employ it's populace. Not how many people actively have jobs.

This is precisely it.

(Employed / seeking employment) is the U3 employment rate - it's a perfectly legitimate statistic for understanding how the job search is going. When economists want to count the temporarily discouaged, they use U4. And when they want to count those not working for other reasons, they use U5. It's annoying that we treat U3 as "the unemployment rate" for political discourse, but it's a perfectly reasonable metric for economic analysis, and I wish people would stop pretending it's some kind of trick.

It also doesn't count people who want to work, but have given up after years of trying. IIRC, unemployment is calculated based on the number of people who are actively filing unemployment paperwork.

U4: U3 + "discouraged workers", or those who have stopped looking for work because current economic conditions make them believe that no work is available for them.

Isn't that called discouraged workers and covered under U5 unemployment? Unemployment is not based on the those who filled out the paperwork... it is based on a population survey. They call up random people and ask a series of questions. There are different levels of unemployment like those who are discouraged or underemployed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unemployment#United_States_Bur...

The term "unemployment", said by itself, is ambiguous. I was annoyed that the Bloomberg article didn't specify. (If it did, I missed it.)

As far as I know those people have never been counted. Certainly not recently. Unemployment is really hard to calculate

They're not included in 'unemployment' as commonly cited, but they're regularly counted.

The labor force participation rate describes how many people of working age are trying to work. 'NEET' stats remove from that number education or vocational training students.

And economists use multiple definitions of unemployment accounting for many different things. U3 is commonly cited, but misleading for this purpose. U4 captures people who want to work but assume it isn't available, U5 captures other unattached workers, and U6 even adds part time workers seeking full time work.

Those are also counted, the Fed releases multiple unemployment numbers, the one everyone thinks of as "the unemployment number" is U3 but you might want to look into U6 which includes discouraged workers and those who want to work but haven't looked recently and the underemployed.

I found this graph helpful[1]. U6 has come down along with the other unemployment numbers, but it also shows how historically bad the recession was. For those affected by it, that's six years they will never get back - they might be "employed" now, but with prospects that are far worse than if the crash hadn't happened.

[1]: http://www.macrotrends.net/1377/u6-unemployment-rate

If that’s true why wouldn’t this have been done in the past where the perceived unemployment was even worse?

I’ll tell you why – because it’s not true.

This is also the risk with "official" statistics. The under employed and "gave up"s are wrongly excluded.