Looking Beyond the Unemployment Rate
Optimist Economy
Kathryn Anne Edwards and Robin Rauzi
4.9 • 829 Ratings
🗓️ 26 August 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The unemployment rate has been hovering around 4.2%. But in today’s highly unsettled economy, many people feel this headline number from the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t capture their economic struggles — from slow hiring to working two part-time jobs to recent graduates unable to find work in their fields. But as economist Kathryn Edwards points out, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also measures underemployment (currently 7.9%) as well as discouraged workers and many other indicators of labor market slack. But there’s one thing the government probably should not measure, and that’s skills mismatch, or being “overqualified” for the job you have. In this episode, we also go way, way back to the Great Depression, when social workers and advocates for the unemployed fought to get the government to measure joblessness at all.
Read more:
- True Rate of Unemployment [Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity July 2025]
- Origins of the Unemployment Rate: The Lasting Legacy of Measurement without Theory. [David Card, UC Berkeley and NBER, February 2011]
- THE PHILADELPHIA NEGRO A Social Study — W. E. B. DuBOIS
- Case studies of unemployment, compiled by the Unemployment Committee of the National Federation of Settlements
- Table A-15. Alternative measures of labor underutilization - 2025 M07 Results [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]
- Table A-11. Unemployed people by reason for unemployment - 2025 M07 Results [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]
- Table A-12. Unemployed people by duration of unemployment - 2025 M07 Results [U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics]
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I have a mechanical keyboard and I looked for one that had like good clicks. Like I was like, |
| 0:07.1 | I'm selecting a keyboard based on click. No, that's, it's very satisfying. I would be kicked out of |
| 0:11.6 | the Amtrak quiet car. |
| 0:18.4 | Hello and welcome to Optimist Economy. I'm Catherine. I'm Robin. On this show, we believe the |
| 0:23.2 | U.S. economy can be better, and we talk about how to get there one problem and solution at a time. |
| 0:34.6 | At the top of our show, we make a few announcements. First, I want to say this episode was brought to you in part by Ben, who calls himself |
| 0:41.3 | a grateful wannabe economist, also a business leader who's sick of the spam. |
| 0:45.4 | He came to us as a spiritual sponsor on Substack, and he's listening to Optimist Economy in Vermont. |
| 0:51.2 | I also want to point out the reviewer who said that his daughter won't take his |
| 0:55.1 | podcast recommendation, so he just went around her and recommended it to his future daughter-in-law. |
| 1:00.7 | And I think this is an excellent move, sir, and I recommend it to everybody. |
| 1:07.3 | All future daughter-in-laws, be warned, you're about to get a recommendation that's right that's right |
| 1:13.0 | also thank you to everyone who pointed out how many broken links we had in our profile it's this is |
| 1:18.9 | a journey that we are all on together and we are fixing those links if they're hopefully they're |
| 1:24.7 | fixed by the time this thing there's Christ that'd be bad |
| 1:28.5 | if we haven't fixed it by now |
| 1:31.7 | we're in real trouble |
| 1:32.9 | by the time you're this yeah |
| 1:35.2 | I think we got it |
| 1:36.7 | next up is retcon |
| 1:39.2 | retroactive continuity where we revisit or correct |
| 1:42.8 | past episodes. |
... |
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