🟫 100 - Unemployment rate 🟦 Labor force participation rate (LFPR) 🟨 Employment population ratio (EPR) 🟩 Me manually dividing the "Employment level" by the "Total Population". Employment level is the number of employed persons in the US

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Long story short... all of these economic terms like: "Unemployment rate", LFPR, EPR, etc.. are super loaded and have a bunch of caveats and convoluted counting criteria. The actual raw comparison in 🟩 shows the percentage of employed americans. Which has been roughly rising since 1950 and is near a somewhat all-time high. From under 40% in ~1960 to almost 50% today... not bad!

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One issue with the green 🟩 line is that it includes retired people, minors (under 16), disabled people, felons in prison... etc who are inelligible to legally work. That's why the idea of the "labor force" exists. The labor force is only the eligible portion of the population. Thus the yellow 🟨 line shows what ratio of the "labor force" is currently employed: "Employment population ratio"

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One issue with the yellow 🟨 line is that some people are elligible to work, but are out of a job temporarily for one reason or another, but will return to work or at least show intent to return to work. These temporarily unemployed people are called "Unemployed" (Capital U). The blue 🟦 line just above our yellow 🟨 line includes these "Unemployed" people and shows the percentage of the population participating in the "labor force"... thus "Labor force participation rate"

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Which bring us to our brown 🟫 line... sigh... buddy... The "Unemployment" rate is just the difference between LFPR and EPR. In other words blue 🟦 minus yellow 🟨. 100-Unemployment is actually a useless number. I put it on there to illustrate that the Unemployment rate is misleading and mostly unhelpful

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So yeah... TLDR( • just under 50% of Americans are employed • about 60% of the Americans who should be able to work are employed • things were slightly better in the 90s and early 2000s... (~5% better) • Things are better now than they were anytime prior to 1980

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We not cooked, but we got work to do

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if unemployment goes up inflation goes down

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Hey #1, that relationship (also called the Phillips curve) is a trend, but is not like a fundamental rule. Pretty strong tendency though Mostly driven by wage pressure and consumer spending. But the simple version is this:

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> Mo money mo problems

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Or also: More jobs, leads to increases in wage pressure and consumer spending, leads to inflation

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