Origins of the Unemployment Rate: The Lasting Legacy of Measurement without Theory

摘要

Between 1980 and 2005 over one thousand articles with "unemployment" in the title were published in the economics journals indexed in JSTOR. Twenty percent of these appeared in the top five journals of the field. Especially in recessionary times the unemployment rate also attracts broad interest from policymakers and the general public. Most professional economists (and many noneconomists) know that the unemployment rate represents the fraction of people in the labor force who are currently searching for work. Surprisingly, it was not until 1940 that our current conception of the labor force—and the idea of equating unemployment with active job search—finally emerged. The birth of the modern definition of unemployment represents a remarkable triumph of practical measurement needs over persistent concerns about the absence of theoretical underpinnings. Economists continue to remain skeptical of any single theoretical definition of "unemployment." In the end, however, the profession has largely accepted the measurement techniques developed by statisticians at the Works Progress Administration and the Census Bureau in the late 1930s.