On the first Friday of each month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) releases the Employment Situation, a collection of statistics that summarizes the labor market in the previous month. This month’s report yielded few surprises — and we should never look too deeply into one month’s data anyway — but the economy added 200,000 jobs in December, twice the job growth in November. The unemployment rate continued to trend down to 8.5 percent.
I thought I’d use this opportunity to delve more deeply into the unemployment rate: what it means, and how it’s measured.
