The whole thing is worth a read, at the New Yorker:
Flawed as they are, though, the employment numbers represent a dramatic and valuable economic innovation. The idea that the government can and should give the public a reliable picture of the economy is a surprisingly recent one. It wasn’t until the Great Depression that the government began calculating a national employment rate, and it’s only in the postwar era that employment data have been systematically and rigorously collected. And if the results are imperfect, that’s because collecting up-to-date, accurate information about the U.S. economy, where millions of jobs are created and lost every year, is remarkably difficult. Imagine that you’re expected to track every job that has been created or lost this month. The new coffee shop that opened up in Baton Rouge, the guy who just got fired from your local auto-repair shop, and that kid who left his job to go to law school—you need to account for all of them. And you have to do this without much enforcement power or surveillance ability. Most respondents aren’t obliged to get back to you in a timely fashion—a major reason for the job-number revisions is that only two-thirds of surveyed businesses answer promptly—and there’s no monthly registry for new companies or for businesses that go under. Good luck.
Although one of the world’s sharpest economics commentators, Surowiecki is a historian. Sometimes you can tell, and for the best of reasons.
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