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This from a February 22nd article in the NY Times concerning the two ways of measuring jobs (and which one is more correct):

...the Federal Reserve has just thrown cold water on the household data. It concludes that the gloomy payroll data is essentially accurate and that the household survey is probably off base. "I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate,'' Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, said in his testimony at a House hearing on Feb. 11. "Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow.''

To test the self-employment theory, the Fed adjusted the household survey by taking out all the kinds of workers who do not show up on the payroll survey - self-employed people, but also farm workers and family workers in family-run companies. Even then, Mr. Greenspan said, the discrepancy remains large. The Fed's conclusion was that the household survey's results have been inflated by overestimates of population growth. Because the household survey is a sample, the Bureau of Labor Statistics infers the total change in jobs by multiplying the ratio of employed to unemployed workers in the household survey by its estimate of the total population. If the population estimate is too high, the estimated number of jobs will also be too high.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics bases its population estimate on the 2000 census, but it updates that estimate yearly with data on births, deaths and immigration. Immigration numbers are largely guesswork, however, because so much immigration is illegal. Fed officials suspect that the immigration estimate is inflated, because it fails to reflect tighter immigration controls after Sept. 11, 2001, as well as declines caused by the economic slowdown...

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