While the government’s official unemployment rate has been hovering around 5 and 6 percent lately, that number doesn’t tell the whole story about joblessness in the U.S. This video summarizes the concept of the “real” unemployment rate and the different ways that the government defines joblessness in its statistics.
Questions:
- Why isn’t the “real” unemployment rate used as the official measure of joblessness?
- What does the large amount of underemployment in the U.S. say about the current state of the economy?