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.
>> Straw man. U5 does not get reported as a headline; U3 does, and it’s highly misleading. <<
Straw man, nothing! I stated that “U5 is fairly close to U3.” It is. The number of “discouraged” workers is only 700,000, up only 270,000 since the start of the recession. That’s out of a labor force of 150 million. U3 is reported because it’s best at comparing apples to apples, not because anyone is playing “hide the sausage.” (Which incidentally is the most hideous malapropism I’ve heard in a long time!) The government proclaims the U3 data the loudest, because it’s the most valid. The government can has a fairly hard count of how many people are actively looking for work, but can only infer how many people are discouraged from looking for work.
Yes, U3 is a little bit of an under-count. Most people have the erroneous belief that it only counts those who are collecting unemployment insurance; this is not true.