EJ Antoni/Heritage writes alarmingly about how the exclusion of marginal workers from the unemployment count is misleading:
If you look at the millions of people missing from the labor market (those without jobs but not included in the official unemployment count), the unemployment rate rises from 4.2% to somewhere between 7.0% and 8.5%, depending on how:
Indeed U6 – which includes workers who are less attached to the unemployment calculation – is higher than U3.
Figure 1: The official rate of the unemployed (U3) (blue), as well as the total unemployed, and all persons with little proximity to labor, and the total number of part-time employees for economic reasons, as a percentage of the public workforce and all persons with little proximity to labor. (U6) (tan). The NBER has defined recession days as shaded in gray. Source: BLS, NBER.
The U6 is actually higher than the U3 by 3.7 p. Above the sample shown above, the gap is between…4.5 p.
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