What are the current theories about why the perceived(?) healthy unemployment rate is lower post-covid? 4.4% is spectacularly good by historic standards. This has also been the slowest medium-term upswing in unemployment since WWII.
The unemployment rate is somewhat useful in aggregate but has a limitation in that it doesn't account for people who have given up seeking employment. Essentially it is a measure of the percentage of the workforce that has a job.
This stat makes a lot of sense for the most part. A stay-at-home parent isn't really unable to find work so shouldn't be counted in unemployment stats (for example).
But sometimes you miss the folk that have become disheartened. I know a few of those folk right now in the tech industry who want to look but just aren't. Our stats miss "mood" in a sense (hard to quantify of course).
That doesn't show up as unemployment, though. It might mean the economy is getting worse faster than that graph, but boomers retiring is dampening the increase.
Boomers leaving (and being replaced) shows up in the jobs number, but not the unemployment number.
So job “growth” is overstated because much of that growth is macro demographic replacement.
But them being out of the workforce entirely shows up in the looking for work numbers decreasing. Therefore their leaving is accentuating 1 and dampening the other.
So more non-producers, who require non-productive health care means that lower unemployment doesn’t feel like a good economy. Thus their leaving healthy post covid number but other measures seeming bad.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE
I'd ignore the headline number and wonder what the longer term trend means because this isn't normal.