Daniel R. Amerman writes: >In an extraordinarily cynical act, the government is effectively saying that because the job situation has been so bad for many millions of unemployed people in their 40s, 30s, 20s and teens, they can no longer be considered to be potential participants in the work force at all. <
I know that it makes more exciting reading, but it's not correct to refer to "an extraordinarily cynical act" as if the government decided to do this overnight (and then acted). Instead, it's "an extraordinarily cynical" definition that's been used for generations, while anyone who knows about how unemployment rates are measured has been conscious of this definition for a long time. (How many articles have appeared on this subject in DOLLARS & SENSE, for example?) BTW, just because the government "is in effect saying" that we should pay sole attention to the "headline" unemployment rate (U-3) does not mean that we have to. Critics of the BLS have been offering alternatives for decades. In fact, nowadays the BLS itself offers alternatives, such as U-6 or the employment/population ratio (which has to be subtracted from 100% to be comparable to the unemployment rate). --- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac
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