Two ways of looking at how hard it is to get a job

The Wall Street Journal yesterday had this diagram.

 

If one looks at hires instead of openings as the measure of how many real opportunities there are and includes both the unemployed and those who have given up looking for work, you end up with a quite different graph than what is shown by the WSJ. I would argue that both of these changes give a much more accurate picture of how hard it is to get a job.

BTW, nice new piece by Walter Williams available here.