The Unemployment Rate: Definition, Statistics, and Analysis

An unemployed person looks for a full-time job that pays a living wage, but who cannot find one. If we agree on that definition, the United States’ real unemployment rate is stunning 26.1%. It is according to an essential new dataset shared exclusively with ‘Axios on HBO.’

The official unemployment rate is artificially depressed by excluding people earning only a few dollars in a week. Also, it excludes anybody who has stopped long for work, and a lack of jobs or childcare demands amid the coronavirus crisis discouraged them.

The rate rises even further, to 52.6%, if you measure the unemployed as anybody over sixteen old who is not earning a living wage. For Black Americans unemployment rate is 59.2%.

We can find the official definition of unemployment in the 1870s. Carrol Wright, a Massachusetts statistician, diagnosed what he referred to as ‘industrial hypochondria.’

Unemployment Rate

Wright managed to minimize the unemployment figure by restricting the ‘unemployment’ label to men who ‘want employment.’

Wright founded the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Moreover, he brought his unemployment definition with him.

Today, you need to be earning no money at all to be unemployed. Furthermore, you must be actively looking for work.

In January, the official rate of unemployment was 3.6%. Nevertheless, the actual rate was seven times greater – 23.4%. It is according to new calculations from the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity, founded by Gene Ludwig. Ludwig is a former United States Comptroller of the currency.

He told Axios on HBO that he was shocked because a quarter of the population that want is unable to earn a living wage.

Naturally, the recession made everything worse. Only 46.1% of Caucasian Americans over the age of sixteen now have a full-time job paying more than twenty-thousand dollars per year. The indicator for Black Americans is 40.8%.

That is the situation of the unemployment rate in the United States.