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It’s not.
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The other big source of monthly employment data, the establishment survey of 146,000 businesses, nonprofits and government agencies from which the nonfarm payroll numbers are derived, is conducted by the BLS.
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It’s worth noting that during World War II the U.S. was plagued by labor shortages, meaning that policy-makers wanted a measure of how many people really, truly were available and willing to work.
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The senior Gordon was also the husband of noted health, employment and education economist Margaret S. Gordon, who died in 1994, and the father of noted labor economist David M. Gordon, who died in 1996. In the father’s obituary in 1978, the New York Times said the family “has been called the Flying Wallendas of economics.”
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U-3 is the headline unemployment rate.
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One fun example of the impact that even minor differences in survey design can have comes from Canada, where the definition of looking for work is less demanding than here. As University of Ottawa economist Miles Corak put it: The crux of the matter is that flipping through the want-ads in a newspaper gets you classified as unemployed in Canada, but not in the United States. Corak estimated that, as of early 2012, Canada’s unemployment rate would have been 1.1 percentage points lower if its statisticians used the U.S. definition of looking for work.
Justin Fox is a Bloomberg View columnist. He was the editorial director of Harvard Business Review and wrote for Time, Fortune and American Banker. He is the author of The Myth of the Rational Market.