Unemployment
The share of the labor force that is jobless and actively seeking work—an indicator of spare capacity and hardship in labor markets.
The unemployment rate is among the most watched macro statistics. It rises in recessions when firms cut payrolls and can remain elevated if recoveries are uneven across industries or regions.
Economists argue over frictional unemployment (normal job search), structural mismatches (skills vs. openings), and cyclical shortfalls in aggregate demand—frameworks that map closely to debates between classical, Keynesian, and monetarist traditions described in “The Economist’s Hour.”
Roadmap: state labor metrics
The project content plan ties unemployment (and related concepts like wages and productivity) to a future state_labor_metrics dataset. Until that lands, the glossary grounds the vocabulary users will need when those maps and tables appear.