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Comment by woodchuck64 | Hacker News Reader

"It may also have made some Norwegians reluctant to work. "One in five people of working age receives some kind of social insurance instead of working," Doerum said, despite an official unemployment rate of 3.3 percent."

20% unemployment rate or 3.3%? Can't figure that one out.

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"Unemployment rate" is usually defined as (number of people looking for employment) / (number of people employed or looking for employment). So if you're not in the labor force (student, have given up looking for work, on disability, stay-at-home parent, etc), then the calculation ignores you--you count toward neither the numerator nor denominator.

This came up the recent US recession because at the beginning of the "recovery," a significant portion of the drop in official unemployment rate came from people who had stopped looking for employment and resigned themselves to being out of the labor force for the time being.

Unemployment, at least in the US, refers to people who are able to work and who are also actively looking for employment. Unemployment rates don't factor in people who have completely given up on finding a job.

I don't know if this is the same in Norway, but if it is, it might help explain the discrepancy.

that's a strange way to classify unemployment. I wonder why that is used?

It's accurate measure for the supply side of the markets. If that number reaches 0% then there isn't any available workforce and wages rise sky high.

It refers to numbers like these:

http://www.ssb.no/en/arbeid-og-lonn/statistikker/aku

Some 70% percent of the population that "should" be eglible for work are "in the work force". 3% of those, are not employed currently.

Note that such numbers are very hard to compare without proper context -- you have to have numbers for pensioners, those too sick to work etc -- to compare it. IIRC Norway's work force participation is pretty high -- so you can be shocked by the "1 in 5" number, but it's entirely unremarkable.

edit: Here are some numbers quoted by NHO "the main representative organisation for Norwegian employers" (note, employers, not employees):

https://www.nho.no/en/Business-in-Norway/Norwegian-Labour-Ma...

edit2: More relevant statistics from OECD at eg: http://stats.oecd.org/index.aspx?queryid=27359

20% seems too high, but the difference is mostly due to people that unable or "unable" to work. They are not unemployed in the sense used here.

Quite a few people choose not to work (fathers and mothers of young children) is a good example. Apart from the oil, one of the bright lights in the Norwegian economy is the fact that a really high percentage of the population is working. If the number is 20% - then that's _really_ low.

The US has currently about 16% of the workforce unemployed or not looking for a job, 20% is not a lot over that and probably in line with other european countries.

(Here at Brazil that number is smaller, but not a lot either, it's usualy over 10%.)

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