(The Ticker – The Washington Post) Each month, as regular readers know, I like to unpack the new unemployment number and get behind the data. The news this month continues to be grim. Indeed, it is climbing rapidly toward record-grim territory.
The official U.S. unemployment rate in October rose to 10.2 percent from 9.8 percent in September, the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday.
But the truer measure of unemployment — a total count of everyone who should be working full time but is not — hit 17.5 percent in October, the highest level in modern times.
The official unemployment number — 10.2 percent — represents only a certain kind of unemployed American. The Labor Department calculates the monthly figure with data provided by a rotating monthly survey of 60,000 households, which are asked specific questions, such as, “Have you looked for work in the past X weeks?” and by jobs data provided by employers.
You can take issue with the way the Labor Department highlights this survey, and I do. But it is a statistically sound way to count one segment of the unemployed.
That being said, there are two other numbers that paint a more accurate picture of joblessness in the U.S.
The first is the total number of people who are either unemployed, who are working part time but would rather be working full time and those who have simply given up looking for work because they are too discouraged by their bleak prospects.
