Even when I took economics in university and we got on this topic, our professor said that it is a very flawed number for such a numerous amount of reasons, but until the government adopts a better way of substantiating, view it as nothing more than a number that may or may not help you gauge the economic climate.
In other words, there is some benefit in understanding our situation with this surveyed number, but you should always question it and the media and government will use it how they please for their own agendas.
The debate on the unemployment rate is very interesting; Google it if you have time and read up.
The issue is who is and who isn't included in the definition of unemployed. The truth is, if you don't have a job and you need one, but you've given up your search, you're still unemployed.
The BLS tracks both these numbers.
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t05.htm
I think half the criticism of the unemployment number is simply because people wish one number could explain everything, but unemployment does not.
Unfortunately it is not measured consistently over long periods of time.
However, 10.2% unemployment even by flawed definition is still significant.
I'm voting total mess.
I see few signs that we are in recovery. What I see is boredom with gloom. People want the economy to be in recovery, so they find reasons to believe it so.
However if we are indeed restructuring to be less of a consumer nation and more of a manufacturing and export nation again, in the long run that's a good thing.
Or to put it in other words, you can't run both trade and fiscal deficits at the same time for ever. Things would not have gone this far if the US didn't have such a huge fiscal deficit, which allowed China to depress their currency by buying US debt. If it had not been for China buying so much US debt, the dollar would have slowly fallen against the yuan over the years, and the yuan would have slowly risen. And if oil wasn't traded in US dollars, we would have invested more in insulation and alternatives much sooner. Now this is all finally happening and it is painful, but unavoidable.
To support your point, I think it is more well known after this last year that "recession indicators" are lagging and we are typically in a recession a good 3-6 months before it is declared and the reverse is true for when we get out of it.
Thanks for bringing this up.
What happens is that companies are not anxious to start laying off employees when the economy goes south, for a variety of reasons. So they start spreading less work among their existing workforce. Worker productivity and hours worked both go down.
This makes these leading indicators. On the other end, when the economy starts winding up at the end of a recession, the now-lean companies aren't anxious to start hiring again. So instead they start giving their existing workforce more work, asking people to work more hours, etc. So you have the opposite: unemployment stays high for a while while productivity and hours spike.
Worker productivity is currently "surging": http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&...
However, hours worked is "holding steady": http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&um=1&cf=all&...
What that means, I'm not qualified to say. And it looks like real economists are (as always) of differing opinions on it. Ideally you'd want to see both of those indicators on the up-tick, but given that one is increasing and the other is not getting worse, it's probably a sign that unemployment is going to start going down here pretty soon.
The beginning of this is generally considered to be the Collapse of Lehman brothers and the dissolutions of Bear Stearns and Merril Lynch which all happened in Sept. 2008. The Unemployment rate in Aug. '08 was 6.2% but that was already up from 4.7% in Aug. '07.
So actually it was a predicting factor on the way down.
http://media-files.gather.com/images/d637/d49/d746/d224/d96/...
The other thing to consider is that we aren't out of the woods yet economically. There are still a lot of credit issues out there. You can see http://bentilly.blogspot.com/2009/11/is-financial-crisis-rea... for a list of some of them. And continued jobless numbers are not about to help.
