thanks for helping me understand instead of all the other bull****

Unemployment is at an all time high since the depression.

Many economist argue the labor force decline is the result of low-skilled workers losing their jobs to outsourcing or automation, having no success finding new employment and therefore dropping out of the labor force entirely. For this reason, they feel the participation rate is a more accurate measure of the state of the job market than the unemployment rate, which only considers those in the labor force. An unemployment rate of 5% means only 5 out of 100 workers in the labor force are without jobs, but it does not consider those unemployed workers who have given up looking altogether, even though they want to work.

Year Unemployed Percentage of Labor Force
1929 3.14
1930 8.67
1931 15.82
1932 23.53
1933 24.75
1934 21.60
1935 19.97
1936 16.80
1937 14.18
1938 18.91
1939 17.05
1940 14.45
1941 9.66

THE EMPLOYMENT SITUATION -- MAY 2016 []Sorry, the page you are looking for cannot be found.
The unemployment rate declined by 0.3 percentage point to 4.7 percent in May, and
nonfarm payroll employment changed little (+38,000), the U.S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics reported today. Employment increased in health care. Mining continued
to lose jobs, and employment in information decreased due to a strike.

I'm trying to understand how this works. It seems to me that you can only compare unemployment rates since no one measured the participation rate a long time ago. Do you know when they first started measuring participation rate?

I have another question. When I was little I only knew one or two kids who's mother worked. I lived in a stay at home mom neighborhood. Now it's just presumed all women will work. How does that impact participation rate? Would my mother be measured as unemployed or just not participating because she had no intention of working?