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Re:America's True Unemployment Rate by pessimizer on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @09:53AM (#24837283)
> people in the real world need to use it

There is absolutely no purpose other than propagandistic for the percentage commonly referred to as "unemployment" with no other qualifiers. That number's only purpose is to start dropping a short time after an unemployment shock whether or not any jobs were actually added to the economy.

The other numbers aren't to give a "broad picture" of the labor market, they're to give the entire picture of the labor market. "Unemployment" contributes nothing. At the time of a shock it echos other metrics, and after a pause of a few months it announces that whatever the administration announced its reaction to the shock would be is starting to work, no matter what the other numbers say.

Re:America's True Unemployment Rate by SpicyLemonZest on Tuesday October 20, 2020 @12:06PM (#24839002)
But the article's graph shows exactly the opposite. According to the "true unemployment rate", the job market has fully recovered from the COVID shock and is sitting at where it was in 2017-18, whereas the official unemployment rate indicates that there's still a problem. I assume we can agree that there is indeed still a problem, so it seems like the official statistics have it right here.