Lots of folks on the Right are claiming that the official unemployment rate is understated. (Jim Geraghty is one of them.) The typical move is to add in “discouraged workers” — those who haven’t been looking for work and have therefore dropped out of the labor force — and sometimes also “underemployed workers” who have part-time employment but can’t find full-time employment. But the “real unemployment numbers” we’ve been hearing are misleading — more misleading, I’d say, than the official unemployment rate.

Alan Reynolds explains why. Those numbers count

people who looked for work at some point during the past year, but not lately. Contrary to press reports, relatively few of the “marginally attached” are those discouraged about job prospects. Adding discouraged workers would only push the unemployment rate up by half a percentage point, to 10.5%. And even that small number of discouraged workers is not simply those who could not find work, but those who simply “think” no work is available, or think they are too young, too old, or that they lack the necessary schooling or training.
The rest of the “marginally attached” don’t even think they can’t find work. Instead, they are not looking for work “for such reasons as school or family responsibilities, ill health, and transportation problems.” To describe such people who are not available for work as “underemployed” (much less unemployed) is an abuse of the language.