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Better Stats
Submitted by Anonymous on April 4, 2012 - 3:11pm.
As I am sure someone has pointed out the description above is not in fact how U3 - headline unemployment - is calculated. If a someone says that they are ready and willing to work they are in the workforce even if they are not collecting unemployment insurance.
The stat you described is closest to the covered unemployment rate, which for comparison stands at about 2.7% right now.
In general I agree that the National Income and Product Accounts are misused, but perhaps for exactly the opposite reason. Far from not being inclusive enough I think there is no reason to depend on this level of aggregation. In the days before computers and the internet it made since to have a single stat. Now, however, we can easily track dozens of if not hundreds of stats. There is no need to try to pack them all together into one measure.
Lastly I don't think the government adopts policies in a deliberate effort to goose GDP as a stat. At least not to a significant degree that I am aware of. If for no other reason than this would not help anything. Its highly doubtful that marginal voters are going to even know what the GDP statistics are let alone change their vote based on them. They are likely going to vote based on how their personal economic situation is faring and that can't be changed by refiguring the stats.
