[frankbreetz]

I don't think it's a joke, basically all statistics are useless in isolation. While it's true unemployment doesn't paint the whole picture, I see a declining labor participation rate as mostly a good thing. It implies families with one working parent, people living longing in retirement and more people going to school. If we tried to maximize for labor participation rate like we do unemployment rate, it would be a very depressing society.

[advael]

Sure, but we're not just cutting out those desirable cases from how unemployment is reckoned. Unemployment as counted is tied to the system that doles out unemployment payments, and thus comes along with all the quirks of legislation that have been added to most American welfare programs to try to discourage people from using the service. Having personally dealt with the unemployment system, I know for a fact that without a ton of legwork, it's really easy to slip through the cracks and get classified out of the category. Were I not a relatively well-off developer with savings to live off in the interim, it would have been difficult for me to do that legwork, so my confidence that the system as implemented isn't knocking a lot of people out of the pipeline (and thus also the statistics) to avoid paying them is quite low. Also, it definitely is not counting the well-documented swaths of people who, in the post-2008 economy, just continue to effectively live as dependents of their parents into adulthood.

I'm skeptical that trying to minimize unemployment, let alone maximize labor force participation, is a good thing for the government to devote resources to do. Optimizers tend to take shortcuts that don't accomplish the real desired goal and have seriously undesirable side-effects, and we see that play out in the unemployment situation as well as others, like standardized tests in schooling, when the government tries to be one. However, even in basic fact-reporting, I think the unemployment statistic is a joke. It's been so overtuned to functioning as a means-testing mechanism for a welfare program that it doesn't actually give anyone not interested in that very useful information