This post at Liscio Report debunks the claim that methodological changes since the Great Depression have made the unemployment rate artificially lower.
Recently several news pieces have made the claim that if the unemployment rate were calculated as it was during the Great Depression, the current rate would be close to double what it is, and creeping toward the formidable rates back in the 1930s.
The first problem with this statement is that there was no official unemployment rate until the 1940s. The ones we use today were reconstructed after the fact. As unemployment ballooned during the Great Depression a number of ad hoc attempts were made to calculate the rate, and the widely divergent results led private researchers and some state and local governments to experiment with various sampling methods….
The second problem with the statement is that it’s just not true. Although the BLS has refined their surveys and made questions more specific, conceptually the unemployment formulas have not changed, and the BLS’s own analysis of test data shows that the impacts of several sets of changes on the overall numbers are minor.
The Liscio analysis is consistent with my encounters with government statisticians. They are not idealogues who arbitrarily change formulas for political expedience. They are serious scientists and statisticians who are unwaveringly committed to obtaining the best measurements possible of very hard to measure things, things that have a very real impact on policy. It is at times a thankless job, made even more so when they are forced to refute nonsense claims about their methodology.