A few weeks ago, I made fun of White House press secretary Sean Spicer for this word salad:

I think there’s a question between the total number of people that are employed, and the President’s comments in the past have reflected that his big concern was getting to the bottom of how many people are working in this country, and that the denominator — meaning the percentage rate of the total number of people — is not the most accurate reflection of how many people are employed in this country.

And, God knows, he deserves a strong dose of mockery. But he seemed to be staggering around a serious point: the unemployment rate tells only a partial story about the job market. If that rate is low because a lot of people have given up on the job search as hopeless, and are therefore not counted as unemployed, then a low unemployment rate would be telling a misleading story. (For more on that, see the post linked to above.)