current unemployment rate?

[Hamlette]

I used to see it all over the place. Even during the great recession. Now I'm just seeing a few educated guesses when I google it. For example, Fortune magazine "estimates" it is currently 14.7%.

Am I just not looking in the right places or is it odd that the current unemployment rate is not being reported?

[Loki Liesmith]

1. It's calculated monthly with the jobs survey.

[JimGinPA]

4. Working From Home Are Ya?

[elleng]

3. 'The 'official' current unemployment rate of 4.4%

—up from 3.5% in February—is lagging, running through the week ending March 13. 2 hours ago'

BUT: Real unemployment in the United States has likely hit 14.7%, the highest level since 1940
BY
LANCE LAMBERT
April 9, 2020 12:38 PM EDT

https://fortune.com/2020/04/09/ureal-unemployment-rate-jobless-claims-this-week/

((Seems a digit was omitted, or fortune's talking through several orifices.))

[mahatmakanejeeves]

5. DU has a thread on the BLS payroll employment report, almost always on the first Friday of the month

There are several ways to calculate unemployment. Here's the report for March:

Nonfarm payroll employment falls by 701,000 in March; unemployment rate rises to 4.4%

There might be more here too:

Mon Feb 10, 2020: The mind-numbing rant, based on a version posted on the first Friday in September 2016:

{snip}

[center]How Do You Define Unemployment?
The Large Print Giveth, and the Fine Print Taketh Away.[/center]

Long ago, a DUer pointed out that, if I'm going to post the link to the press release, I should include the link to all the tables that provide additional ways of examining the data. Specifically, I should post a link to Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization. Table A-15 includes those who are not considered unemployed, on the grounds that they have become discouraged about the prospects of finding a job and have given up looking. Here is that link:

Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization

Also, hat tip, Recursion: How the Government Measures Unemployment

[font color="red"]New material, added August 8, 2016:[/font]

This appeared at the top of page A2 in the Wednesday, July 27, 2016, print edition of The Wall Street Journal. as "Jobless Picture is Open to Interpretation."

Jobless Picture is Open to Interpretation

Gauges used to measure unemployment vary in how they define who is out of work {print: "Political campaigns clash over different ways of measuring unemployment"}



By Josh Zumbrun
[e-mail]
@JoshZumbrun

July 26, 2016 7:56 p.m. ET

Because political campaigns can rise and fall on the health of the economy, spats often flare over the gauges used to measure growth and unemployment.

The latest dust-up, raised by the campaign of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, focuses on the monthly employment numbers. A long streak of hiring has nudged the jobless rate down to 4.9%. ... Donald Trump Jr., the nominee’s son, recently criticized the official statistics as “artificial numbers…massaged to make the existing economy look good.”

The nominee himself has said unemployment is far higher than the Labor Department’s headline 4.9% rate would suggest, part of his message that the economy is in a dire state. After he won the New Hampshire primary in February, Mr. Trump called the official jobless figures “phony” and said the real number could be as high as 42%.

This isn’t the first time people have cast aspersions on the jobs numbers in an election year, but the Trump claim is also part of a larger discussion over how best to assess the health of the labor market.

The following link to Barron's might not work for everyone. See progree's tips.[/font] From the July 20, 2015, issue of Barron's:

Refresher Course: Inside the Jobless Numbers

Are we undercounting the unemployment numbers—or overcounting? How the BLS gathers and calculates the numbers, and why it matters.

By Gene Epstein
July 18, 2015

The unemployment rate has never been the object of as much attention from the markets and the media as it is now, sparked by the keen interest taken in its monthly fluctuations by policy makers at the Federal Reserve.

Despite the heightened focus, there are a lot of misunderstandings and misconceptions about how the rate is calculated. Some people assume the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiles the rate from the unemployment-insurance rolls. On that basis, they fault the BLS for undercounting the unemployed. But that’s just one myth among many about this cornerstone measure of economic pain and labor-market slack.

To estimate the unemployment rate, the BLS actually relies on the monthly Current Population Survey conducted for it by the Census Bureau. While the data are highly imperfect in their own way, we think the Federal Reserve is right to view the official unemployment rate as the best available information, while also keeping its eye on ancillary measures of “labor underutilization.”

In fact, a close look at BLS methods suggests that, if anything, the official unemployment rate may be overcounting rather than undercounting the unemployed.

[font color="red"]New material:[/font] In August 2015, DUers whatthehey and progree got into a 1995 report from economists John E. Bregger and Steven E. Haugen. The .pdf is unfortunately an image and thus challenging as a source of quotes. Trying to find it in a format that does make for easy copying, I was led to this:

Alternative Unemployment Rates: Their Meaning and Their Measure March 12, 2014

{snip}

[beachbumbob]

6. Forbes guess is pretty close to what it is as of today

the official numbers don;t come until BLS releases the monthly info which looks back a month, and runs a month late. For the period of February, the data was released on March 27th. So March will be released on April 27th and we won;t know April's until June 27th

[Igel]

7. It's a meaningless number.

It's changing quickly, and it usually says something about the health of the economy, the consequences of millions upon millions of choices small and large made by millions of different people. This is the consequence of government shut-downs, the political decisions (presumably informed by medical knowledge) of perhaps two score people.

When the pass-through payroll funding kicks in, it'll be even more meaningless, because people will be on the payroll who may not actually have a job to go back to--if I were an employer, I'd keep the people no the free payroll until there was a reason to lay them off.

Think of it as a medically induced coma and on a ventilator. No, the patient isn't conscious, but what does that say about his health? He was put in that state by a drug. Are his lungs able to work on their own? Right now the muscles are paralyzed. Until they try to wake him up, you can't know if he can be woken up or what he'll be like when he's awake. Until they remove him from the ventilator, you don't know if he can breathe on his own.

Until the government-enforced shut-down ends, there's no way of knowing the health of the patient.

Any prediction based on that is impossible. Any claim that the *real* problem is something other than the shutdown is baseless. There are concerns, but how those play out depends on decisions made by government, by the businesses involved, and by their creditors/vendors/customers/employees.