Talk:Shadow Government Statistics

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This entry, and in fact almost everything I have seen on "Rational Wiki" is complete bunk. Way to go wikipedia to create a forum for corporate lackeys to spew their nonsense. The idiot author of this article provides absolutely no evidence for his vitriol. One of his references states that Williams spends a lot of time on U4 and U6 data which the BLS still publishes. Well no kidding Sherlock, that's why he states this very clearly on his website, see the line that is labeled "U6". The SGS Alternate is his calculation and that includes discouraged workers as well as underemployed workers. And furthermore, the U6 number is NOT reported as part of the "official" unemployment rate, it is a footnote on the BLS report, this is not rocket science. Two of the four references are the exact same article from the San Francisco Chronicle. A third reference is John's website and the fourth is the BLS U4-6 data, good research The author of that article also provides no evidence for his point of view, for example to discredit Williams he says:

"The Labor Department regularly publishes data on "discouraged" workers (those who have looked for work sometime in the last year). Nevertheless, the single best measure of unemployment is the one that counts only those still actively looking for work among the unemployed."

Really? and why is that Mr. Zuckerman? since you provide no evidence at all for this claim. Can someone give me one coherent reason why a the "single best measure of unemployment" is to NOT count people who are unemployed? Are these people somehow now employed because they stopped looking for work? Apparently they are in the topsy turvy world of Rational Wiki, what a joke. — Unsigned, by: Beaunicole / talk / contribs 19:21, 29 November 2011‎ (UTC)

I think I'm dangerously close to violating Poe's Law right now. -- Seth Peck (talk) 19:23, 29 November 2011 (UTC)