When you hear about the unemployment number " not reflecting those that leftbthe work force", what does that really mean? How does the government get an idea of how many left work force? Thanks guys
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Apart from the official unemployment rate (U-3), BLS also releases several other statistics related to employment (e.g. U-1 to U-6 unemployment rates, civilian labor force participation rate, etc). The easiest thing to do is to go to their website and read about how these numbers are defined and calculated.
What it is, is an arbitrary number that allows the Fed to keep the QE spigot wide open. Party on bulls!
The general theory is, what you want to know is not how many people are unemployed, but rather how many are unemployed who actually WANT to be employed. So this is easily measured because people who are out of work and looking for a job in many cases seek and claim unemployment benefits. That's one way of tracking it. Of course the rub there is when those run out, they fall out of that data pool. But there are many people who don't want to be employed or who simply are not looking and therefore don't accurately gauge the strength of the employment environment. So the unemployment rate is simply the number of unemployed people divided by the total number of people in the labor force with the labor force being defined as the people who have been actively searching for a job the last 4 weeks.