We measure things. We construct systems to generate numbers that tell us about the reality of our world. This week marks the fist installment of a new series here at 90ways: Dissect-O-Stat. Once a month from here on out, we will look at a quantitative measure of the health of our society to figure out exactly what goes into making that number and, I hope, shed a little light on what that number actually means.

The inspiration for this new series comes from an observation by the impeccable Jed Emerson. A few years ago he told Fast Company, "People assume that econometrics was handed down from the hand of God to Alan Greenspan. And that's not really the way it worked. That interpretation of value has evolved over the past 50 years." In honor of his insight, we are going to start dissecting some of those metrics as well as helping to assemble some new ones.

Up this week: unemployment. In the weeks to follow we will dissect many other statistics, including poverty, value over replacement player and net profit. If you have statistics you would like to see dissected or dissections of your own that you would like to submit, please contact carter@90ways.com.

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Before we even get to the dissection, I have to start with one bone to pick: categorizing things by what they are not is a terrible idea. It's one of the reasons 90ways' Essay house is not called the Non-Fiction house. As such, and for the purposes of full disclosure, I must go on record as saying I think "unemployment" is a bad term. But let's set that aside for right now.

The unemployment number that you hear about in the news from time to time comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Labor Department. Each month, over 1,500 employees of the Bureau conduct detailed phone surveys of about 60,000 households. They carefully select these households to be representative of the US population as a whole in terms of things like race, area of the country, industry of employment and rural vs. urban landscapes.

All people in these households who are older than 16 count as either employed, unemployed, or not in the workforce. People are classified as employed if they did any work for pay during the week of the survey, even if that work was part-time or temporary. People are counted as unemployed if they do not have a job, have actively looked for work in the last 4 weeks and are available for work. Finally, everyone else counts as not in the workforce, including stay-at-home moms or dads, students, retirees and, finally, people who have given up looking for a job. For the mathier among you, you can check out a more detailed (and surprisingly clear) description of the methods of calculation here. For the Bureau's most recent report, go here.

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Of course, this overall employment number doesn't tell us the whole story. No one person's situation fits the characteristics of the country as a whole. Rather, we are all much closer to the regional and demographic pictures that the Bureau provides. The highest unemployment rate in major urban areas in America is Detroit, at roughly 7% and closely followed by Providence/Fall River (6.3% as of February 2006). These statistics track closely with race -- unemployment for black males as of this time last year was roughly 10%, compared with about 4% for white males. State-by-state unemployment rates fall out roughly like this.

There are significant disparities in employment around the United States, but the world-wide employment picture, seen here, is even more varied. The overall world unemployment rate is roughly 30%, though you can find a country by country breakdown here. If you check out that list, you'll notice that barely more than 4% of the people in Belarus and Bolivia are unemployed. In Ecuador and Peru, where roughly half the population lives on less than a dollar a day, unemployment is 7%. But here's what's weird: unemployment among French youth is over 20%. How is that possible? In an undeniably impoverished place, the unemployment picture is almost three-fold rosier than that it is in one of the most educated and wealthy nations in the developed world (and what's more is that whatever economy does exist in Peru is substantially driven by mining, which produces almost no jobs). And it doesn't stop in France: the overall unemployment rate in Italy is almost 9%. In Germany it's more than 10.5%.

On some level, it's difficult to compare unemployment across countries because they use different methods for calculating the statistic. But the difference between 7 and 20 is more than just a function of counting. In order to figure out what's going on, let's take a step back and think about why we care about employment or unemployment in the first place.

We often use unemployment as a basic proxy for the health of the economy. We use it to figure out how much of the country's population is able to get a living. On the whole, this is the wrong thing to use it for. Unemployment, with some minor variations depending on how it's counted, is just a way of counting the number of people who don't have jobs but are looking for them in the mainstream economy. For places like Peru or Belarus, where many people work outside the global economy or tradition holds that a large part of the population (namely women) is not allowed to go to school or work, the idea of getting a living cannot be approximated by the number of people who are looking for jobs.

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In 1932 Bertrand Russell wrote a paper called In Praise of Idleness. "First of all," he said, "what is work? Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth's surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so. The first kind is unpleasant and ill paid; the second is pleasant and highly paid." He's glib, but in many ways he's accurate. And deeper in the paper, he really gets to the heart of the matter: "Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone. This was made obvious during the war. At that time all the men in the armed forces, and all the men and women engaged in the production of munitions, all the men and women engaged in spying, war propaganda, or Government offices connected with the war, were withdrawn from productive occupations. In spite of this, the general level of well-being among unskilled wage-earners on the side of the Allies was higher than before or since.... The war showed conclusively that, by the scientific organization of production, it is possible to keep modern populations in fair comfort on a small part of the working capacity of the modern world."

So, employment does not mean getting a living. But what Russell doesn't discuss is that it works both ways. On the one hand, technology has freed us from the need to work all the time to secure the necessities of living, but on the other hand, there are many of us out there working more than full time and securing less than the necessities of living. Maybe that's the more relevant thing to measure.

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