> I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. Conspiracy theorists and the people who sell them newsletters don't want to

> I don't want to do a bunch of my own research to tease out the unemployment rate. Conspiracy theorists and the people who sell them newsletters don't want to do that either. That's why most of these conspiracist stories boil down to either amateurishly misinterpreting existing measures - e.g. alleging that the unemployment rate must be 100% minus the employment/population ratio - or trying to spin conspiracy where it doesn't exist, say by alleging that the US government is fudging statistics by not reporting the higher/wider U-6 measure of unemployment more prominently (U-6 is about twice the "official" unemployment rate at any given time - and has been for ever).