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Related Lessons
Lesson: Focus on Economic Data: The Unemployment Rate - April 2002
Focus on Economic Data: The Unemployment Rate - September 6, 2002
The unemployment rate for the month of August was 5.7 percent, a decrease of .2 percent from July. The number of individuals employed increased by 39,000 this month.
Focus on Economic Data: The Unemployment Rate - October 4, 2002
The unemployment rate for the month of September was 5.6 percent, a decrease of .1 percent from August. The number of individuals employed decreased by 43,000 this month.
Focus on Economic Data: The Unemployment Rate - December 2001
The unemployment rate for the month of December 2001 was 5.8 percent, up 0.2% from a revised 5.6% for November. The number of individuals employed decreased by 124,000. The monthly unemployment announcements receive headline treatment almost every month. Changes are significant indicators of national economic conditions and have relevance to every local community as unemployment has significant costs to the individuals who are unemployed and to the entire community and the U.S. economy. Those costs are explored in this lesson. Changes in levels of employment are also included in the announcements and are equally important indicators of the direction of the U.S. economy. This particular announcement will receive additional attention as it is a large increase in unemployment, combined with increasing concern that the U.S. economy is already in or will soon be in a recession.
Related Publications
The following lessons come from the Council for Economic Education's library of publications. Clicking the publication title or image will take you to the Council for Economic Education Store for more detailed information.
Teaching Financial Crises
Teaching Financial Crises is an eight lesson resource that provides an organizing framework in which to contextualize all of the media attention that has been paid to the recent financial crisis, as well as put it in a historical context. The current events stories, opinion pieces, and other popular media pieces that are today in great supply have generally not connected to educational objectives, historical analysis, and economic processes and concepts that are used in the high school classroom. In Teaching Financial Crises, teachers will find a non-partisan and non-ideological resource to help them simplify and offer balanced perspectives on this challenging subject matter.
3 out of 9 lessons from this publication relate to this EconEdLink lesson.