Greenspun sliced up the unemployment numbers and got 9.1%<p>Unemployment statistics were redefined starting in the early 1960s by the Kennedy Administration. First they took out the "discouraged", people who wanted a job, but had stopped looking. Under the Reagan Administration, the workforce was expanded by adding in members of the U.S. military, who were by definition "employed", thus shrinking the percentage of "unemployed". The Clinton Administration reduced the number of households sampled from 60,000 to 50,000 and "a disproportionate number of the dropped households were in the inner cities." Phillips doesn’t talk about prisoners, but we have greatly increased our prison population, most of those incarcerated are working-age men, and none are counted in the workforce. Phillips claims that "Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent." [Poking around at <a href="http://www.bls.gov/cps/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bls.gov/cps/</a> reveals that, in 2007, 146 million of us were working, 7 million were unemployment, and 4.7 million were classified as not in the workforce but "wanted a job"; an additional 2.3 million Americans were in prison, presumably due to their energetic work habits in illegal trades. The "U-6" series, published by the BLS but almost never reported by newspapers, shows an unemployment rate right now of 9.1 percent.]<p><a href="http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/04/23/cooking-gdp-unemployment-and-inflation-numbers/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2008/04/23/cooking-gdp-un...</a>