Fwiw when people talk about the “unemployment rate”, both colloquially and in political discussions, they’re usually referring to U-3, which is unemployed people who sought work some time in the last 4 weeks. It is currently at 4.2%.
This makes a lot of sense as a short-term/political category, but makes less sense if we’re envisioning long-term changes.
I dunno if prime-age LFPR instead of LFPR would make Plan A easier to digest (and would tentatively bet against). An obvious problem with that is that the numbers will be closer to U-3 so misunderstanding the number would be more common.
Regardless I think the exact metric doesn’t matter as much as long as it’s well-defined, the distribution of changes matter more.
Fwiw when people talk about the “unemployment rate”, both colloquially and in political discussions, they’re usually referring to U-3, which is unemployed people who sought work some time in the last 4 weeks. It is currently at 4.2%.
This makes a lot of sense as a short-term/political category, but makes less sense if we’re envisioning long-term changes.
I dunno if prime-age LFPR instead of LFPR would make Plan A easier to digest (and would tentatively bet against). An obvious problem with that is that the numbers will be closer to U-3 so misunderstanding the number would be more common.
Regardless I think the exact metric doesn’t matter as much as long as it’s well-defined, the distribution of changes matter more.