Regarding Idan’s:

Great EE topic! Did you hear me say in class that just between January and early May of my like 30th year of being
an econ major/teacher/etc., my own views on this seem to have shifted, because the reality of the pace of tech
change seems to be shifting.

Corrections: being counted as unemployed is not linked to paying taxes or not.

Underground market is more "not in the labor force" and therefore not counted as unemployed (nor as employed)

Regarding Meghna’s:

Always good to be able to think of true examples of various econ concepts--IB scores are helped by this, like yours
on Nepal. This would be a case of Nepal's structural (and therefore natural) rates of unemployment recently rising for
that specific reason.

Agree that Vocab is very important, the way IB tests are designed and scored. But the point of underground
economy is that drug dealers would typically be counted as "not in the labor force," not as unemployed.

Regarding Farid’s:

You learned in class that the statistical agencies do actually measure full-time different from part-time, in the fine-print
details. In the "Headline Number" of the unemployment rate, though, any type of employment counts as Employed.

The impacts on society that you and the book listed are quite profound, don't you think? Look at Baltimore to see
impacts (although there's a lot more going on there).

Regading Alisha’s:

I put exchange rates and Chapter 10 together in one unit for no great reason, so I don't mean to imply any direct
relationship between the two. Still, you learned how a high currency value can hurt exports, which could lead to a
loss of jobs in export industries, which you might count as structural unemployment if the job losses become
permanent, or as cyclical if the e-rates are also cycling up and down. That's probably the closest connection between
the two.

As you heard in class, the unemp rate is not done through a national census (which would mean a thorough counting
of everybody's status), but rather through a small random sample of calling people during American Idol.

Regarding Laura’s:

To me "underground economy" is highly similar to "black market." Both are uncountable by official stats. The minor
distinction would be that black market is closely linked with illegal, but underground can be broader, also including
totally legal activities like housework or lawn care that might be paid in cash and never reported to any gov't agency,
like for tax avoidance reasons. The tax avoidance is illegal, but the rest of it is not.

Beware Unemployment (rate) has a more specific definition that would be needed for IB (which you have below).
Also, Frictional has other examples than the one given.

Note that seasonal unemployment exists in the world, but it is deliberately statistically removed from the official stats,
so that they can focus on the underlying structural and cyclical matters without being clouded by large annual
seasonal cycles (like surrounding Christmas)
Regarding Ashik’s:

Good point about the similarities in the difficulties of measuring both GDP and unemployment rate.

About your question, the book and our earlier class meetings have laid out some major difficulties in the whole issue
of labor force interpreting uempl. rate, centering on the discouraged worker effect and participation: is the measured
U.S. rate falling because of genuine improvement or because people are dropping out of the labor force instead of
searching and being unemployed?

Regarding Patricia’s:

I can't easily see your classmates' responses to your question, so maybe you have great answers already, or by now.
But I'll answer anyway: it's just by definition that Natural = Structural + Frictional + Seasonal. That leaves only
Cyclical as the only kind of unemployment that does go away when the economy is as good as it gets. The others do
not; they persist at all times, even during "full employment."

Regarding Reema’s:

“if there was any way in which measuring unemployment could be more accurate?”

Later in class you learned that the (U.S. at least) government collects vast amounts of unemployment data beyond
the one national average rate. Even for the national average, they publish 6 different measures of unemployment,
where in one of them they do count discouraged workers as unemployed, for example. Which of these 6 is the most
'accurate' is a matter of opinion, so they lay all the info out there and let economists and other observers sort through
the details. (Your book makes it sound like there is just the one inaccurate national summary statistic - not true.)

reasons for why they can't reduce employment

What I was trying to get to on Friday May 8 and what the book gets to in the HL page(s) on the short-run Phillips
Curve is that unemployment can be reduced if we are willing to accept higher inflation. OR: unemployment can be
reduced temporarily if we are willing to accept higher prices permanently. So there often seems to be this trade-off
between these two "macroeconomic objectives" (see the title of Chapter 10). That's one main reason. Another is
that a lot of unemployment might be structural, and so it's pretty much impossible for the government to do anything
that would quickly or easily would make unemployable people employable.

Regarding Shashank’s:

full employment means neither of those things. It means the amount of cyclical unemployment at that time is thought
to be zero, which would mean that the economy is at the best, peak part of the business cycle when it can't get any
better. But the other 3 types of unemp will persist, and the rate will be maybe around 4-5%.

"a lot of downfalls to having low unemployment such as a fall in GDP"

--This is a misunderstanding. High unemployment is what accompanies a low or falling GDP (recession).

"Is there any point is separating and defining the different types of employment, What difference does it really make?"

-- In the video about Is It Cyclical or Is It Structural, there is a big point. Cyclical unemp can be cured by the right
amount of expansionary fiscal policy (or monetary policy, chapter 12), but structural unempl can't be cured that way,
and so those policies might not be a good idea in the event of str. unemp.

Regarding Tomas’s
No one else (so far) took my hint to address the Real World Focus. To me it's clearly structural. When "employer
goes out of business" permanently, and this happens throughout the whole industry (not just one employer), this is
exactly what we mean by a structural change. Those jobs won't come back when the economy gets better (which
would be a case of Cyclical Unemp)

I use the same example you do of a 0% unemployment situation: Stalin's gulag work camps. But you are confusing
"full employment" with 0% unemployment. Full employment = 0% Cyclical unemp., but the other 3 categories do not
go away even when 'full.' So Full Empl is desirable, but 0% is not.

Regarding Leonardo’s:

At the end of Ch 10 HL students especially learn that if unemployment is reduced "too much," then inflation might get
worse. The various policies (3 sets of them) to try to fix unemployment, inflation, or both are the whole subject of
Chapter 12.

Regarding Cesar’s:

For many years it was persistently true that the U.S. had lower unemployment and presumably a lower natural rate of
unemployment than almost all European countries. Like I remember teaching that after years of strong economic
growth before 2008, the U.S. unemployment rate was like 4.5% and in France, etc. it was still 9%. They used to have
a word for the Labor Market Rigidities in Europe: Eurosclerosis, like the term for hardening of the arteries.

Recently, though, we don't hear as much about that. Still, most of the outside edges of Europe from Ireland to
Greece are in much worse shape than both the center and than U.S.