The baseline unemployment rate is currently 9.4 percent. There are also a bunch more cats who are looking for work and can’t find it, don’t have enough work, or want work but have given up looking for it. That number, the infamous U-6, is 16.4 percent.

Officially, the highest rate post-World War II is 9.7, hit in 1982 (we had 9.6 percent unemployment the next year). The Bureau of Labor Stats doesn’t seem to have U-6 rates going back past 1999, so I’m not sure what the rate was then. We sure as heck don’t have U-6 numbers for the Great Depression, and reporting wasn’t all that scientific, but I have been wanting to keep these numbers straight for awhile, just to get an idea of where we are. Unemployment by year, back in the bad old days:

1929: 3.2%
1930: 8.7%
1931: 15.9%
1932: 23.6%
1933: 24.9%
1934: 21.7%
1935: 20.7%
1936: 16.9%
1937: 14.3%
1938: 19.0%
1939: 17.2%
1940: 14.6%
1941: 9.9%
1942: 4.7%

So it could be worse. Um… Cheer up?

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at 2:25 am and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.