U3 data goes back to 1890. There's always someone, usually in an opposing political camp, who says "it's misleading" when it goes down, or when it goes up. Both the left and the right have done this sort of handwaving over the years, but having a stable statistic that goes back many decades is useful even if you want to look at others for a more complete picture about what's going on. On some planet having U6 go from above 17% to just over 11% from 2009 to the present counts as "failed recovery" but I'm not quite sure how. You could argue that there's a bit of a gap there, like around 1.5% if you look at recent history, and maybe even argue that it's structural, i.e. that information technology is causing full-time work to go away, etc. but that's a technical argument to have, which would require looking at a lot of data and not just trying to score points by cherry-picking.
>On some planet having U6 go from above 17% to just over 11% from 2009 to the present counts as "failed recovery" but I'm not quite sure how.
Agreed. I argue this point all the time, actually. I think it's interesting to go back through and look at how unemployment fairs in comparison to the political party of the president during that time. Looking at the U3 rate for the past 50 years, unemployment has only gone down once under a republican president (Reagan) and Carter is the only democrat in the past 50 years who didn't see unemployment drop from the time he took office to the time that he left office.
Ah, this seems like the key answer to my question - it's the only one that's been tracked for generations, and we often want to compare across that time scale.
