U.S. payrolls rose 199,000 in November, unemployment rate falls to 3.7%

It is easy to imagine how the unemployment numbers are in reality different than the stated 3.7% (e.g. depressed people less likely to even respond.) However, as another comment says, it should be stable across time for the US, even if not directly comparable to other non-US populations.<p>The unemployment rate is calculated from a monthly survey of 60k households.

One thing that always confuses me with unemployment figures is that they don’t account for labor force participation. People who drop out of the workforce and stop looking for work no longer count towards the unemployment rate. Theoretically, if a country had a labor force participation rate of 0%, they could also have an unemployment rate of 0%, but that’s obviously not a good thing unless robots are doing everything.<p>Currently, the US labor force participation rate for those 15+ is at about the same level as it was in 1977 and down from its peak in about 1997, after which it has been on a steady drop with a small uptick in 2019 and again last year. See this chart: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.worldbank.org&#x2F;indicator&#x2F;SL.TLF.CACT.NE.ZS?locations=US" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;data.worldbank.org&#x2F;indicator&#x2F;SL.TLF.CACT.NE.ZS?locat...</a><p>I’m not an expert at all but I just find that the unemployment rate in isolation is hard to interpret unless you also look at labor force participation. An unemployment rate of X% in 2023 is different from X% in 1997 in terms of the percentage of the population actually working.

We know that they are lying, they know that they are lying, they even know that we know they are lying, we also know that they know we know they are lying too, they of course know that we certainly know they know we know they are lying too as well, but they are still lying.