Chapter 28

The focus of chapter 28 was mainly on unemployment and what kind of role it plays in the economy, detailing how the statistic is calculated along with how the economy is affected by it. For unemployment to be calculated, people either have to be employed or unemployed, with the definition of unemployed being something else than what a person might first think. It takes into account whether the person has worked before and is looking for a job, and how long it has been since the person had a job. People that have had no employment are not taken into account, skewing the statistic by saying there are less people unemployed than there should be by not taking into account certain groups of people, like college graduates looking for jobs but never having one before. Due to how the economy is, there are always some people unemployed, as both frictional and structural unemployment play roles in it and affect how many are unemployed. Frictional depends on the person as workers take time to search for jobs, while structural is because some labor markets don't have enough for everyone looking for a job. Unemployment rate ends up being an imperfect measure of joblessness mainly because of how some people might respond to government surveys, along with how it is calculated.