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To: maceng2 who wrote (39481)	10/13/2003 12:02:48 AM
From: GraceZ	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

If you ask a number of Americans how many times they have been unemployed in their lives and then ask them how many times they have collected unemployment insurance you will get two different answers from most people. As I explained in this post: Message 19394956 The two aren't equal, those receiving insurance is a subset of the unemployed universe. We define unemployed as anyone who is not currently working, who is actively looking for a job. The sampled number is higher than the insurance rolls. We kick people off the dole after 6 months (except in certain cases where, like after 911, Congress voted to extend benefits for a bit longer) regardless of whether they've been able to find a job to their liking. Being off the dole doesn't mean they have a job any more than being on the dole means they don't work under the table. My point is the real unemployment number can be found with a little bit of effort and imagination. It's not as if we don't have the technology. If you have a technology which can measure the desire for a job without interviewing people in a given population then don't waste it on me, take it to Oslo. BTW the exact number of people on unemployment insurance is available on a regular basis but as I've explained it's not a useful number if you are trying to measure unemployment. Notice when the numbers for insurance claims are given they are expressed in actual numbers of claims, not percentages of the population. It's only useful to see if new claims are rising or falling, but even that isn't that useful because many companies will have policy changes leading up to a layoff which make people voluntarily leave their jobs and those people won't show up to claim unemployment.