jasencomstock replied to your quote: My first question is where are all the workers…
I think after 99 weeks a person isn’t considered looking for employment anymore, so they are not considered actively unemployed.That might be the cutoff for benefit eligibility (not sure how this works in the US), but as far as the US BLS is concerned, unemployment can last as long as you’re looking. The breakdown goes up to five years, beyond which there’s just a category for five years or more.
That’s true for duration statistics, but those people are not included in number of people unemployed. Nor are people underemployed, those that have stopped looking nor disabled folks like me:
This change affects estimates of average (mean) duration of unemployment. The change does not affect the estimate of the number of unemployed persons and does not affect other data series on the duration of unemployment.
Duly noted. Thanks so much for pointing this out! I’ve been blithely going through all this employment data for my RAship without thinking about how it affects the actual headline stats - my fault for not being more careful with the definitions. Sorry about that.
This means there are potentially a whole lot of people who have been looking for work but totally unable to find it for a very, very long time - wow, that is a seriously suboptimal situation. (Although it doesn’t look like this explains all the people leaving the labour market.)
