The main measure of employment in the United States is the Current Population Survey conducted monthly by the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics. In a March 5, 2008 column in The New York Times, excerpted below, David Leonhardt described the birth of the survey, and its major shortcoming:
In 1878, Carroll D. Wright set out to do something that nobody in the United States had apparently ever done before. He tried to count the number of unemployed.
As is the case today, the 1870s were a time of economic anxiety, with a financial crisis -- the panic of 1873 -- having spread into the broader economy. But Wright, then the chief of the Massachusetts Bureau of the Statistics of Labor, thought there weren't nearly as many people out of work as commonly believed. He lamented the "industrial hypochondria" then making the rounds, and to combat it, he created the first survey of unemployment.
The survey asked town assessors to estimate the number of local people out of work. Wright, however, added a crucial qualification. He wanted the assessors to count only adult men who "really want employment," according to the historian Alexander Keyssar. By doing this, Wright said he understood that he was excluding a large number of men who would have liked to work if they could have found a job that paid as much as they had been earning before.
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