FRED® Blog — What is unemployment? There is more to it than not working

What is unemployment? To answer this question first requires a few definitions. A person is considered unemployed if he or she is actively seeking work and willing to take work here and now. It is therefore not sufficient to simply not be working. But this definition of unemployment does necessarily define (1) whether someone who is underemployed should be counted as well or (2) how intensely someone must search for a job to qualify as unemployed. For this reason, the Bureau of Labor Statistics provides different unemployment rates, graphed above. These are commonly called U-1 through U-6....

The FRED® Blog
What is unemployment? There is more to it than not working

Paul Solman — Will We Ever Get to 'Full Employment'?

When we talk about "full employment" of 4 percent (or even 6 percent) these days, do we mean the same thing we used to back when?

The answer is no. The government has changed the way it measures unemployment and as a result, some Americans who used to be counted as officially unemployed no longer are -- because they haven't looked for work recently enough. That's why I devised our monthly U-7 statistic, which includes everyone who says they want to be working full-time, but aren't. Compared to the official unemployment number of 7.6 percent, U-7 is running at 16 percent.

There's another significant difference between official unemployment today, compared to that statistic years ago. As we explained in a story back in 2003, many more Americans are now on either disability or in prison than in previous years. Were they out on the street looking for work, today's official unemployment number, as well as our "Solman Scale" U-7, would be several percentage points higher than they are.

PBS NewsHour — Business Desk
Will We Ever Get to 'Full Employment'?
Paul Solman