Good question, from what I can gather, it is added to the denominator to make sure the rate is adjusted towards them, though I don’t fully understand that.
As for your clarification, while they are “alternative measures”, I believe they are still unemployment rates with the main difference between them being who gets defined as unemployed. Can you clarify why you believe they aren’t unemployment rates?
For the second, I didn’t mean these aren’t unemployment rates. Rather, there are other things that one might also call unemployment rates. Trivially, a lot of the questions here are fairly arbitrary—anyone below 16 is never in the labor force, but why not 18? The marginally attached are those who last searched between 4 weeks and 12 months ago, but why not 6 weeks − 8 months? Perhaps more interestingly, anyone who just doesn’t want a job isn’t counted in the numerator or denominator of any of these rates, which I think means that if we get UBI and want to know “did this discourage people from wanting to work”, none of the unemployment statistics will tell us. (The “labor force participation rate” would be relevant.) Or, someone on active duty in the armed forces (looks like 1.3 million people) also doesn’t count in any of these, so the army downsizing would affect the rates differently than a civilian employer downsizing by the same number of people.
This isn’t necessarily a big deal, certainly I’m not saying the BLS should be publishing any statistics it’s currently not. Just, you said “Here are all the unemployment rates in the United States”, and… to be clear I don’t expect this was your intent, just a thing I mildly read into your wording. And I feel like I’m writing a lot of words on this relative to how much I think it matters. But, I dunno, I kind of feels like it mildly reifies official statistics? Like, this post already does a great job at pointing out “the idea of an unemployment rate might sound fairly simple, if you hear what it is you might think you know what that means, but there are a bunch of complications and different reasonable ways one might calculate it, you need to look under the hood”. But I think it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t stop at the official statistics, it’s possible (at least in theory) to look under the hood in other ways too.
Incidentally, I’m amused that the investopedia article, after explaining what the different unemployment rates are and why you might care about the difference, doesn’t tell you which one is used in the “unemployment by race/gender” graphs.
Good question, from what I can gather, it is added to the denominator to make sure the rate is adjusted towards them, though I don’t fully understand that.
As for your clarification, while they are “alternative measures”, I believe they are still unemployment rates with the main difference between them being who gets defined as unemployed. Can you clarify why you believe they aren’t unemployment rates?
Ah, following that first link a bit further, it looks like indeed they’re not counted as part of the labor force.
For the second, I didn’t mean these aren’t unemployment rates. Rather, there are other things that one might also call unemployment rates. Trivially, a lot of the questions here are fairly arbitrary—anyone below 16 is never in the labor force, but why not 18? The marginally attached are those who last searched between 4 weeks and 12 months ago, but why not 6 weeks − 8 months? Perhaps more interestingly, anyone who just doesn’t want a job isn’t counted in the numerator or denominator of any of these rates, which I think means that if we get UBI and want to know “did this discourage people from wanting to work”, none of the unemployment statistics will tell us. (The “labor force participation rate” would be relevant.) Or, someone on active duty in the armed forces (looks like 1.3 million people) also doesn’t count in any of these, so the army downsizing would affect the rates differently than a civilian employer downsizing by the same number of people.
This isn’t necessarily a big deal, certainly I’m not saying the BLS should be publishing any statistics it’s currently not. Just, you said “Here are all the unemployment rates in the United States”, and… to be clear I don’t expect this was your intent, just a thing I mildly read into your wording. And I feel like I’m writing a lot of words on this relative to how much I think it matters. But, I dunno, I kind of feels like it mildly reifies official statistics? Like, this post already does a great job at pointing out “the idea of an unemployment rate might sound fairly simple, if you hear what it is you might think you know what that means, but there are a bunch of complications and different reasonable ways one might calculate it, you need to look under the hood”. But I think it’s worth remembering that it doesn’t stop at the official statistics, it’s possible (at least in theory) to look under the hood in other ways too.
Incidentally, I’m amused that the investopedia article, after explaining what the different unemployment rates are and why you might care about the difference, doesn’t tell you which one is used in the “unemployment by race/gender” graphs.