Under-Employment rate much, much worse

From the Real Time Economics blog at the WSJ.com:

While it’s the government’s unemployment rate that moves headlines every month — the latest, for July, comes out Friday — the “under-employment” rate, or “U-6” rate, includes everyone else affected by the moribund job market: people who want to work but haven’t looked in the last four weeks because they figured no jobs were available and those working part-time gigs but would prefer full-time positions.

(By the way, the government’s number-crunchers prefer “four-quarter moving averages” when it comes to state data because of it’s smaller sample size. By taking in longer time spans, the government may boost the reliability of the findings.)....

Michigan (4 quarter average)

Unemployment:  9.4%

UNDER-employment: 17.4%

Difference:   + 8.0
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Link: http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/print.pl/lau/stalt.htm