Based on your understanding of the passages given below, answer the questions that follow.
Reading Comprehension:
How many really suffer as a result of labour market problems? This is one of the most critical yet contentious social policy questions. In many ways, our social statistics exaggerate the degree of hardship. Unemployment does not have the same dire consequences today as it did in the 1930s when most of the unemployed were primary breadwinners, when income and earnings were usually much closer to the margin of subsistence and when there were no countervailing social programmes for those failing in the labour market. Increasing affluence, the rise of families with more than one wage earner, the growing predominance of secondary earners among the unemployed and improved social welfare protection have unquestionably mitigated the consequences of joblessness; earnings and income data also overstate the dimensions of hardship. Among the millions with early earnings at or below the minimum wage level, the overwhelmingly majority are from multiple-earner, relatively affluent families. Most of those counted by the poverty statistics are elderly or handicapped or have family responsibilities which keep them out of the labour force, so the poverty statistics are by no means an accurate indicator of labour market pathologies.
Yet there are also many ways our social statistics underestimate the degree of labour market related hardship. The unemployment counts exclude the millions of fully employed workers whose wages are so low that their families remain in poverty. Low wages and repeated or prolonged unemployment frequently interact to undermine the capacity for self-support. Since the number experiencing joblessness at some time during the year is several times the number unemployed in any month, those who suffer as a result of forced idleness can equal or exceed average annual unemployment, even though only a minority of the jobless in any month really suffer. For every person counted in the monthly unemployment tallies, there is another working part-time because of the inability to find full-time work or else outside the labour force, but wanting a job.
Finally, income transfers in our country have always focused on the elderly, disabled and dependent, neglecting the needs of the working poor, so that the dramatic expansion of cash and in-kind transfers does not necessarily mean that those failing in the labour market are adequately protected.
As a result of such contradictory evidence, it is uncertain whether those suffering seriously as a result of labour market problems number in the hundreds of thousands or the tens of millions and hence whether high levels of joblessness can be tolerated or must be countered by job creation and economic stimulus. There is only one area of agreement in this debate that the existing poverty, employment and earnings statistics are inadequate for their primary applications, measuring the consequences of labour market problems.