Duration of Unemployment

Being unemployed...sucks. Unless you have a rich uncle, giving you lots of money from earth or the grave, unemployment stresses most people out. The duration of unemployment is how long someone is unemployed...the longer, the more stressful, usually.

Aggregate all those individual-unemployed-people’s-stress, and you get how economists feel about the unemployment rate, which tells us what percent of the labor force is out of a job (and wants one).

The more people that are unemployed, the higher the unemployment rate. The longer the duration of unemployment, the longer it will take the unemployment rate to go down (or, if you want to think about it the other way, the longer it will take employment to go up...though just keep that in your head, since economists rarely speak in those terms).

Things like recessions might make the duration of unemployment for peeps last longer, since they’re struggling to find jobs, and maybe decide to learn new skills or move as a result, which takes even more time. And time is money.