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Unemployment
About This Indicator
What Is Unemployment?
The share of the labor force, everyone working or looking, that is jobless and has looked for work in the past four weeks. Those who stop looking drop out of the count, so the rate can fall without anyone being hired.
Why Does It Matter?
It is the plainest gauge of how hard work is to find, and it reaches people with jobs too: when few are looking, employers must compete, so raises come easier. Because it comes from a household survey, a tenth of a point is within the margin of error; a half-point rise over a few months is not.
Can Politics Influence It?
At the margin, and with a delay. Stimulus and unemployment insurance can soften a downturn, and Federal Reserve rates speed or slow hiring over a year or two, but the big swings follow the business cycle, which no government controls.
Key Idea
Unemployment tends to rise fast and fall slowly: from the start of the Great Recession it doubled from 5% to 10% in under two years, then took about six years to get back to 5%. So a term's change says as much about where in the cycle it began as about anything done during it.
Scored: A Fall Ranks Better
Source: BLS. LNS14000000 from 1948; Economic Report of the President, Table B-22, before.
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