New Fox News piece: The Real Story Behind Our Unemployment Numbers

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

Most people seem to believe that the number of Americans with jobs is a clearly identifiable number. All you do is count up the number of people with jobs. Unfortunately, that isn't the way it works. The number reported each month is based on surveys, and surveys have can often have problems. As it turns out, the surveys estimating the number of people with jobs reported over the last couple of years suffered from some really big problems. The economy actually lost about 824,000 more jobs during the recession than we previously thought.

But those adjustments have so far only been made through March 2009, and there are strong reasons to believe that the survey data since then also needs to be adjusted downward. . . .

ADP has some interesting estimates of its own about how the number of jobs has continued falling over time (in thousands).

Aug 2009 108,740
Sep 2009 108,520
Oct 2009 108,342
Nov 2009 108,221
Dec 2009 108,160
Jan 2010 108,138

Some other information on unemployment predictions made by the administration (here and here).