As regular readers of The Ticker know, we like to hammer on the official U.S. unemployment rate versus the unofficial rate, which we believe to be a truer picture of joblessness in this country.
This morning, the Labor Department said the official number climbed from 9.4 percent in July to 9.7 percent in August.
But the unofficial number jumped from 16.3 percent to 16.8 percent.
The difference between the two rates is due to who's counted among the unemployed.
The official number is arrived at by combining a rotating monthly survey of 60,000 U.S. households performed by the Labor Department's Bureau of Labor Statistics with jobs data sent in by employers. According to this measure, you are marked as "unemployed" if you're jobless and you meet certain criteria, including whether you looked for work in the previous four weeks.
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