1. "Unemployment" and "not working" are not synonyms. Unemployment, pretty much as it as always been calculated, is a percent of the "labor force". And being in the labor force requires either "working" or "looking for employment." If you ain't looking, you ain't unemployed. Period.

1A. The biggest source of potential dispute in unemployment statistics is disagreement about what counts/should count as "looking"? If I get fired as a professor, and I turn down an offer to wash dishes in a restaurant, am I still looking? What if I turn down a job to be a high school substitute teacher? To be a professor at a salary 10% less than my pre-termination salary?

2. The notion of "what counts as 'looking'?" is always going to be fuzzy in application, because being underemployed can be a bigger negative for the economy than being unemployed.

2A. And it can be a bigger negative for the same reason zero unemployment (much less zero people "not working") is bad for the economy: In many cases, the costs of searching for the most productive job are substantially greater when you are employed than when you are not working. Why? Put it this way, if you want to interview for a new job, what do you tell you're boss? Do you lie, and if so, how do you avoid getting caught? If you don't lie, is your boss going to be okay with you taking an hour off? What if the interview is a plane flight away? Even if your boss is okay with it, what's it going to cost the boss to arrange to cover for you? Or do about that client or vendor you need to be talking to, like, yesterday?

Zero unemployment is a bad idea. The trick is in figuring out what the best level of unemployment >0 is. No economist worth anything will ever say we should have zero unemployment. No two economists worth anything are ever likely to agree on how much non-zero unemployment is optimal.

3. Notwithstanding the above, the possible error in measured unemployment rates is tiny compared to the error in how we talk about inflation. What people usually mean when they talk about "inflation" is the "cost of living." (Technically inflation is simply a decline in the purchasing power of money; all prices, those for "living" and those for "other stuff" are going up at the same time. The cost of living a particular way is how much of the other stuff you have to give up. Pure inflation doesn't change this, because it doesn't change the price of X relative to the price of Y. If you paid $100 for X before and $150 for Y before, now you pay $150 for X and $225 for Y.

3A. The problem all of us worry about, though, is how the prices of X (what we buy) change relative to the prices of Y (what we sell, most importantly for most of us, our labor services).

And in that regard, the cost of living has been going up a lot more than the "2-3% inflation rate" that the "official reports" claim. On the order of two or three times as much.

I drove to the burbs of Chicago today. I paid $1.90, $3.00, $2.00, $1.50, and $0.90 for five tolls. These are almost exactly double what I paid about a year ago when I made the same trip, or an increase of about 100%. The gas at the Belvidere Oasis was only $3.90, or about a 20% increase from what I remember. The bottle of water I bought at the Mobil station was $2.49, up about 25%.

Now these three prices don't measure my personal cost of living particularly well. I live in Iowa where transport and water prices are almost always substantially less than these Illinois people have to pay, and I rarely make this trip. But if I did live around here, and I saw these living prices going up at this rate of change?

And the reality is, though the starting prices in Iowa are lower (that gallon of gas was 3.49 when I bought it this morning in Iowa, and that same bottle of water sold for $1.50, the rate of increase I've been seeing in Iowa is a heckuva lot closer to those I've just reported for Illinois than to 3%.

At the end-of-year faculty meeting we were given the usual fun news about next years salary expectations -- a whopping increase of 1.35 %. My fellow faculty members (invariably big fans of Obamacare) were bummed about the fact that our faculty share of our insurance premiums went up by about 6 percent. It is a bummer, but a pretty darn small one -- that 6 percent amounts to a whopping $6-10 of the single faculty member's monthly budget and about $35 for the faculty member with family coverage.

None of them seem to realize that the real culprit is other prices -- things like food and rent and property upkeep and the cost of regulation to keep our butts sufficiently clean....things that mean a lot more than 30-40 bucks a month.

Or, for that matter, the cost of all those other things the college budget has to cover, like sustainable windmills and country club housing for students, and a food court instead of a cafeteria and assorted brick and mortar upgrades and a rope course and a disk golf course and all those top end admin types we've been hiring over the last decade.

When I started, the average prof salary here was somewhere between the 65th and 70th percentile of all profs of similar rank at 4-year non-research institutions. The admin at the time established a target of bringing us all up to the 70th.

Yesterday's report? Full and associate profs (the tenured people like me) are at the 60th and falling. The assistant profs and instructors (the untenured) are at the 56th.

And what do we complain about....$30 a month more for a health care premium.

And what do we cheer about ... we probably won't have to get pre-certification for those MRIs, CTs, and PET scans.

I'm not saying we profs have it bad. Compared to many, we live lives of luxury. And many of us don't deserve what we get, here or elsewhere. But the principle is the same -- if you want to know why your own cost of living sucks and is getting worse, look to the other things that the people who pay you are spending their dollars on.

That's the real culprit. Not "the economy." "The economy" is the excuse those real culprits use to mis-spend wealth on things other than you. Don't let them get away. Make them explain why *their* budgets for the things *they* want keep going up more than yours do. Make them explain why *their* stuff is more important than yours. Make the bastards squirm.

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Cuz we sent the jobs out of the country???

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