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Comment by tom_mellior | Hacker News Reader

> currently not earning their keep, but not actively searching a job (because they are on the dole) will not be unemployed

Why? If you are on the dole but without any disability or other commitment, you are considered "available to start work", no? Being available is one of the typical conditions for getting unemployment benefits.

> unable to take a job in the next two weeks because the are in a government job market program, will not be listed as unemployed

That's true, and it's one of the reasons why it's not super meaningful to try to compare and interpret these figures without any additional information.

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This is how the BLS U3 statistic is arrived at. The U3 is the federal-level unemployment figure that is most commonly pointed to.

The U3 specifically does not include discouraged workers, those who are underemployed, or those who simply aren't looking.

As long as we are comparing apples to apples (i.e., these figures are all indicative of the same basic data with the same restrictions), there's no issue comparing them.

Some countries' job centers put jobless people into bullshit training courses that do nothing for them, but being in a course means you are not counted as "looking"/"available" for a while. Other countries do not do this.

The "same restrictions" apply, but countries in the first category will have fewer "unemployed" people even if they have the same number of discouraged/underemployed/jobless/whatever people.

Is that apples to apples?

> but being in a course means you are not counted as "looking"/"available" for a while

Are there enough people to whom that distinction applies to be more than statistical noise relative to the other regional variations that would have an impact?

Seems like a minor nit to pick in the grand scheme of things.

Austria is regularly criticized for doing this through such measures and others (pushing people into early retirement as well).

Here is a thing in English that seems to come for free if you give them bogus personal data: https://www.agenda-austria.at/en/publication/austria-the-lan...

A longer German blurb about this study is here: https://www.agenda-austria.at/oesterreich-das-land-der-verst...

They claim 250,000 hidden unemployed for 220,000 "official" unemployed for Q1 2013, i.e., the official figures would be off by a factor of more than 2. But they don't say how many of those hidden unemployed are in training courses. Maybe the full study does say, I can't be bothered.

Thanks, surprised it's that significant of an impact.

Yes it is, since those countries allow people to claim unemployment while not looking for work (via a rather silly rigmarole way of doing so, but still). At the sharp end, there are fewer people in that country who want a job (whether because they'll lose their unemployment if they don't get one or otherwise) and can't get it.

All that is true for the unemployment rate itself. It just means that the unemployment rate is not a useful proxy for a country's economic health, as it is often taken to be.

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