By what possible metric are you considering the U6 more accurate???
The ones that suits his political views.
U6 is the same number when viewed by libs and cons
it is most accurate since it takes into account those who have stopped looking because the economy is so bad or those marginally attached. U3 can include someone who has found employment for an hour a week. Even U6 does not tell whole story since it does not count millions BO has put on welfare and disability.
u6 is 50% higher now that Obama is ruining economy by shipping jobs to China and discouraging work with Obamacare, etc etc.
What exactly are you trying to measure? The U6 is obviously not a more accurate measure of unemployment because it includes people who have jobs.
Let's break it down....Unemployed is an objective measure: either you looked for work in the last 4 weeks or you didn't.
Marginally attached is subjective..."Do you want a job?" I can be pretty sure that a person trying to get a job wants a job. I can't be so sure that someone who says they want a job but isn't actually doing anything about it really wants a job.
And look at it this way....In May a person responds that she looked for a job 10 months ago, then found out she was pregnant so quit looking for work. She says she doesn't want a job and wants to stay with the baby. She would be classified as Not in the Labor Force (does not want a job) and would not appear in any alternative measure.
But by June, when she's interviewed again, she's changed her mind and thinks maybe she does want a job after all. So she says yes she wants a job and could start one, but that she hasn't started looking yet. She's now marginally attached and would appear in the U5 and U6 numerators.
But what about her situation has changed? Her chance of getting hired went from 0% to 0%. And you would say that the employment situation is worse because the U6 has gotten bigger. And if she changes her mind again in July?
Is that an accurate measure of the actual labor market?
And you didn't point out that the U6 includes Part Time for Economic Reasons, defined as those who worked less than 35 hours during the reference week who could have and wanted to work 35 or more hours but didn't due to slow business or couldn't find a full time job. Now, you do reference that 1 hour/week is considered employed, but PTFER doesn't change that. They're still employed. But if you want to claim the U6 is a measure of unemployment and that they are actually unemployed, you run into an interesting dilemma
Person A and Person B are both married, no kids, and work as waitresses at the same restaurant. A doesn't want to work full time and works 20 hours/week. B does want to work full time and normally works 36 hours/week. But during the second week of June, business was slow and the manager cut one of her shifts short so she only worked 34 hours that week. Now she's part time for economic reasons and you would call her a more accurate measure of Unemployment.
But A would be employed because she's voluntarily part time. So you would call A employed at 20 hrs for the week, and B unemployed at 34 hours/week.
This seems more accurate to you? That in my first scenario a person changes nothing but her mind and becomes unemployed and in the second the person who worked longer hours and got more pay is really unemployed while the person who worked shorter hours was employed. You'll really have to explain the accuracy part.
The U6 is broader and is useful for giving a bigger picture of what's going on and how much more labor could reasonably be gained. But that's not accuracy.
Great. You just alluded to only about 4 of the dozens and dozens of other variables one must look at.
