The government produces a lot of data about the economy. These regurgitations include calculations about the labor market as a key indicator of where the economic winds are blowing. The most common figures quoted by the news media include things like jobs numbers (and not the kind commonly found on Craigslist), meaning the number of jobs added in a given period, and unemployment rate.
However, this isn't the most accurate number to determine the amount of work being done in the economy. Reporting the number of people who are working disguises the fact that not everybody works the same amount. Some people are part-time, some people are full-time...and even within those groups there is variation on the number of hours being worked. And there are contractors. Think: Uber and Lyft drivers, who skew those total labor stats.
Reporting aggregate hours helps clear up this confusion. The figure represents the total of all hours being worked. The government reports it for the country as a whole and for individual industries. It gives a clear idea of the labor input needed to produce the stuff we are producing.
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Finance: What is the Unemployment Rate?15 Views
finance a la shmoop what is the unemployment rate so negative like
shouldn't it be the employment rate at least that way we'd have a bigger number
and bigger is better in the u.s. right well anyway the unemployment rate in
this country is tracked carefully because it's one of the Canaries in the
mine shaft giving us an early heads-up on the direction of the economy well [canary hopping in cage in mineshaft]
jobs are generally highly volatile in a given range and the government copiously
inspects this data as it affects so many other things principally the costs of
renting money has set out by the Fed because high employment stimulates
inflation and low does the opposite well the government's gonna ask is the
unemployment rate shrinking too fast I eat everyone's getting jobs well if so [government officials in conference]
then beware inflation is coming which historically has motivated the Fed to
raise interest rates in response or constrict the supply of cash out there
and the opposite is true as well one of the big cocktail party conflicts and if
you find yourself at a cocktail party debating this notion make like the
Jordan Peele movie and get out but if you can't and you must debate well there
is a quote natural rate unquote of unemployment of around five or six
percent yeah zero percent unemployment ain't never
gonna happen generally the higher the unemployment rate the worse shape the
economy is in but remember the unemployment rate doesn't tell the whole
story the government can help create a bunch of temporary or low-paying jobs
too cosmetically raise the employment rate in the short term like ahead of an [happy government officials in conference]
election but the quality of those jobs is probably not great like think temp
workers at the DMV well after a while of longer term unemployment some people [long line at the DMV]
will just give up hunting for jobs and if they don't even go on indeed or
Glassdoor looking for work so they're kind of permanently in the unemployment
numbers so the unemployment rate might seem to be a bit less dire in that case [unemployed people holding up cardboard signs]
but in fact well there might still be a lot of people who needed jobs out there
we don't know we're just looking for some numbers to help us direct
understanding of where the economy has gone and help us then tweak things so
interest rates are optimized at the inflation numbers that we want to hit
got it not everyone is qualified to stick that thing on the back of your
license plate that shows you red yeah a whole lot of government workers I [hand adds stickers on back of license place]
guess do that now bad times
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