“Discouraged” shows up in U5, which is fairly close to U3, so that’s just a red herring. “Underemployed” is an economic problem, but if someone is working only 25 hours a day, instead of 35, that’s very different than reporting him as if he were working 0 hours a day, which is what you were doing by referring to U6 as if it were unemployment.
And, yes: SOME “underemployed” people are in that category rather voluntarily. Case in point, while I was working on my Master’s degree, I was “underemployed.” Had an ideal job come along, I would have slowed down my degree work. I even applied for several jobs. But I was unwilling to take a full time job outside of my career path because I was getting the bills paid, and having the opportunity to work towards a better career.
Lots of working moms have been in similar situations.
THere’s a reason that the news media and the government have never widely reported U6 data, and that’s because it’s not very economically meaningful.
Straw man. U5 does not get reported as a headline; U3 does, and it’s highly misleading. The reason they show U3 is that it doesn’t include contract workers, or the long-term unemployed (once they drop off the unemployment rolls), just to name 2 important categories of employees.
U3 is a dream number, not reality. I happen to think that if you consider 25 hours a week as “full employment” not worthy of being considered in U3, you are again hiding the sausage. Someone who wants, is looking for, and likely NEEDS a full paycheck isn’t getting it because the jobs aren’t there. So if you’re using U3 to measure employment, it’s fundamentally flawed.