Another foray into calculating the true unemployment number.

The BLS keeps track of employment and participation by education level.  You can take that data and compute how many people, over 25 years old, whatever their education level, are not participating in the labor market - these people have either retired or given up, but the numbers are huge. 72 million people are not in the labor force. The breakout is as follows, in millions:

< High school: 13.534
High School: 25.043
Some College / Associates: 17.439
Bachelor's and higher: 15.941

How many retired? How many gave up?  The Social Security Administration keeps statistics of those collecting benefts. They are either retired or disabled, or other, which they call early retirees. The number is 62.5 million, but since 4.5 million of those are children, let's take them out, giving us 58 million retirees. That means 14 million from the over 25 list are not working, nor retired, not counted. There are an additional 7 million not in the labor pool from the 16-24 age bracket who are also not enrolled as students and not counted as part of the labor pool.

So let's add this up: 11.8 million officially counted + 14 million 25+ not counted, not retired + 7 million 16-24 not counted, not in school. That's 32.8 million unemployed. Now the current civilian labor force is 155.8 million, and we've got to add in the 21 million not being counted. That gives us a true labor pool of 176.8 million, and a true unemployment rate of 18.55%. 

Underemployment is on top of that. And they are calling this a recovery.