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In case you think 18% is Japan's unemployment rate: it's not. Japan's unemployment rate is 2.5%.

https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.UEM.TOTL.ZS?location...

This is basically the best in the world.

https://www.oecd.org/en/data/insights/statistical-releases/2...

Not sure what rate OP is citing, but it's not the one I'd use to draw OP's conclusion. You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.

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> You don't wanna YOLO understanding how employment rates are calculated.

You're way better off YOLO'ing reading the documentation about how they are calculated than listening to the myriad pundits deliberately trying to mislead people and drive conspiracy theories.

This is all documented on the websites of the various statistical agencies, and you can just read their docs.


Yes, I agree. The person I'm replying to knows only enough about employment rates to have bad conspiracy takes.

Correct. I was using labor participation rates. As a society gets depressed and has a hard time people stop trying (ie they no longer count as unemployed, which doesnt count the people who are no longer trying to get a job).

Similar to how as police systems fail, people stop reporting things assuming nothing meaningful will happen anyways. And then there's less reports of crime, so magically "crime is down" -- high fives to the police system... (/s)


I think that fudging the numbers to bolster your pet theory is not an acceptable way of looking at this data.

He wasn't fudging anything, his phrasing was

> ~18% of their working age people *do not have jobs*

Which is a correct interpretation of participation rate. His theory on the causes may be off, but his numbers weren't


His theory on the cause is wrong, and using the wrong number is dishonest here. I agree he more or less correctly cited labor force participation rate (still basically the best in the world) but badly misrepresented what that number is such that he should be apologizing and not doubling down. Dishonest.

I actually think we should only be using labor force metrics for everything, if someone stops looking because their depressed and can live at home - suddenly that's ok? I don't think we should stop counting people like that

The problem is differentiating between those who've given up and who do not want to work (have other means to sustain themselves).

In general, either is fine by me as long we are consistent: they are both proxies for percentage of people needing work and should correlate to a large extent.




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