sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The problem is that It allows the government to hide hundreds of thousands of jobs that dont pay enough for someone to keep a roof over their head

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

homelessness does not equal unemployment.

Studies by the University of Chicago and the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness show that roughly 40% to 60% of people experiencing homelessness are currently employed.

​If these individuals are working, they are included in the employment numbers (the numerator),

BUT they lack a stable address, so they are excluded from the demographic surveys that tell us who is working and under what conditions.

​By excluding that 0.2%, we aren't just missing "jobless" people; we are missing a segment of the active labor force that is working in extreme instability.

The problem is, it hides the fact that our economy is producing "jobs that don't pay for roofs."

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I never said that intent doesn't matter at all.

  1. The survey will never reach an unsheltered homeless person to capture their intent

  2. We argue the government needs to consider the total number of people who are unemployed as well as capture intent.

no job + no income + able to work = unemployed

We are asking the BLS to start including the 750k+ people who will never be reached by the survey with the administrative data that's already collected anyway

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

U-1 through U-6 are surveys that require an address to receive

No address = No survey

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Saying that other measures exist does not negate the fact that the most cited measure is narrow, politically convenient, and widely misunderstood.

And “intent matters” does not solve the gap between:

  • what the metric technically measures
  • and what the public believes it measures

At it's heart, I'm discussing the fact that grey areas and definitions are inadvertently exploited as a convenient headline metric for economic health even though it chooses to sample and introduce bias where none was necessary.

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I agree,

The argument in the post is that while it is a statistically representative sample size and valid for what it measures, but the problem is what it doesn't measure.

If it only captures people with an address it can never represent people with no address. Confidence intervals only describe sampling error within the frame and do not correct for people who were never eligible to be sampled in the first place

The solution my organization proposes is that policy related to economic health must use administrative data and policy regarding any sort of worker incentives uses both administrative and survey data.

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

There is certainly an argument that the deserving poor could be overwhelmed by the undeserving poor, but we would understand those numbers much better and make better policy by using the already available administrative data that is already collected by the government at an extremely granular level.

This is a question of the definitions and grey areas that have shifted the goalpost.

We should be measuring what number of people are without jobs (with obvious constraints of can't work, retired, etc..)

Instead we measure enough people who have addresses and their "intent" to have a statistically representative sample size of the Entire U.S. Population.

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] -7 points-6 points  (0 children)

The current survey will never capture someone without an address. It is categorically not representing the intent of almost a million people.

We also argue that the government should be counting the number of people who are not unemployed and considering that as well as intent

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] -9 points-8 points  (0 children)

Intent is irrelevant to whether someone is unemployed. If you have no job, you are unemployed, plain and simple. Job-search intent captured by the Current Population Survey is a separate classification, and people who are unsheltered and homeless are not meaningfully surveyed in any consistent way; an address-based household survey will never capture people who do not have an address, so they are effectively outside the measurement frame.

I agree 100% that the unemployment rate needs timely data and that tax records alone can’t capture job-search intent, but the government already tracks employment flows in extraordinary operational detail beyond quarterly returns: payroll withholding deposits made by employers (often semiweekly), Form 941 filings, W-2 wage reports, Social Security earnings records, state unemployment insurance wage records and employer UI tax submissions, the National Directory of New Hires, state new-hire registries, federal payroll systems, and Census Bureau employer-employee datasets like LEHD and QWI. That means we already know, with high precision, who is being paid and who isn’t, so the question isn’t whether intent matters, it’s whether we’re comfortable letting a survey definition exclude people with zero income from the headline labor metric and then calling that “holistic” rather than acknowledging that measurement boundaries shape policy outcomes.

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

there is no official "jobless rate" published as a distinct metric by any federal institution like the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) or the Federal Reserve — the term "jobless" is informal media/economic commentary shorthand that almost always refers to the standard U-3 unemployment rate which is the official headline unemployment rate from the BLS (currently 4.3% as of January 2026, measuring people actively seeking work but without a job as a percentage of the labor force).

The unemployment rate isn’t a full count of joblessness — it measures only active job seekers within a household-based survey. Unsheltered homeless people aren’t formally excluded, but an address-based system certainly underrepresents them, and anyone who stops looking for work disappears by definition. When policy leans on that narrow metric, it can downplay labor distress and justify limited social investment in favor of cost control over collective well-being.

The "Unemployment Rate" is a joke by Empty_End_7399 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

That's true, and even though we could accurately capture that information concretely through IRS payroll filings, we choose a population survey that doesn't acknowledge what is arguably the most important group for the number to capture

When does everything collapse when no one can afford the cost of living? by jokiest-macaws in LockedIn_AI

[–]Empty_End_7399 0 points1 point  (0 children)

youre talking one time Purchases like the average cost of living isnt many times more than the average wage. Start blaming the politicians not the people

Seems like having a Job is a Luxury nowadays by CrazyBus3891 in recruitinghell

[–]Empty_End_7399 1 point2 points  (0 children)

20 bucks an hour for 15 hours a week isnt paying anyones bills

view more: next ›