The official U.S. unemployment rate is an inadequate measure of labor market conditions. This poses a major challenge for basic research and for successful economic policy. In this piece, the author proposes a new definition of unemployment is proposed. It considers those part-time workers who would like to work full time as 62.7% employed and 37.3% unemployed inasmuch as this is the proportion of time they work relative to full-time workers. New monthly estimates of the unemployment rate are calculated for the period 1994-2019 and find that their average during this 25-year period was 10.7% or 5.0 percentage points above the official rate of 5.7%.
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