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11. 977,000. Of that 2.6 million, almost a million are considered "discouraged workers," unemployed individuals who have given up looking for work. Once the economy begins to add jobs at a more robust pace, the unemployment rate may actually rise because discouraged workers will once again begin to look for jobs. "If we really got substantial job growth around 200,000 to 300,000 jobs a month, which is what we need for a healthy jobs growth that can deal with new entrances to the labor market and start putting people back to work ... then people start to become more optimistic and some of the discouraged workers begin to look for work," says Schreft, who is also a former economist and vice president at the Kansas City Federal Reserve. "They're not counted right now in the 9.1 percent unemployment rate, but they would then become 'unemployed' because they would be people who are actively looking for work."
12. 9.6 percent. Who says college isn't worth it? The unemployment rate for those whose highest level of education is high school stands at 9.6 percent. For those with a bachelor's degree or higher, the rate is only 4.3 percent.
13. 8.6 to 8.9 percent. That's where the Federal Reserve expects the unemployment rate to be at the end of this year. Many private economists have offered much more dire predictions. For instance, Goldman Sachs expects unemployment to still hover near 9 percent at the end of 2012.
14. 18.5 percent. Earlier this month, Gallup found that 18.5 percent of the total workforce remains underemployed, meaning they're unemployed or working part-time but they want to work full-time. That level is basically unchanged from a year ago. "Focusing merely on unemployment instead of underemployment tends to ignore the hardship facing the millions of Americans forced to work part time," says Dennis Jacobe, chief economist at Gallup in a recent news release. The underemployment number is even higher for certain subgroups, including those ages 18 to 29 (28.9 percent), those who have not attended college (23.1 percent), and among blacks (27.8 percent), according to Gallup.
15. $49,445. Recently, the Census Bureau announced that real median household income fell to $49,445 in 2010, the lowest number since 1997 after adjusting for inflation. "We have fewer workers working fewer hours at lower wages in an inflation-adjusted sense," O'Keefe says.
Twitter: @benbaden
Corrected on 09/28/2011: An earlier version of this story misstated the average duration of unemployment, the total number of nonfarm payroll jobs, the percentage of the unemployed that are considered long-term unemployed, and the unemployment rate for adult men and women. Respectively, the correct figures are 40 weeks, 131.1 million, 43 percent, 8.9 percent, and 8 percent.
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