Unemployment figures and other lies

http://www.weedenco.com/welling/Downloads/2006/0804well...
A very dismal prospect. No question, this is the dismal end of the science— even for a dismal scientist! But the longer I’ve looked at the numbers and the statistical series as they’ve evolved over the decades, the more that I’ve started finding things in the numbers that most people do not see. One thing that you find when you look into all this is that the federal government is very honest in terms of disclosing what it does. It always footnotes the changes and provides all the fine details. Nonetheless, some of the changes are nothing short of remarkable and the pattern over time is what I call Pollyanna Creep—...What has happened over time is that the methodologies employed to create the widely followed series, such as what used to be called the GNP but is now widely followed as the GDP, the CPI, the employment numbers, all have had biases built into them that result in overstating economic growth and understating inflation— both of which are admirable political goals...Real unemployment right now—figured the way that the average person thinks of unemployment, meaning figured the way it was estimated back during the Great Depression—is running about 12%. Real CPI right now is running at about 8%. And the real GDP probably is in contraction. I venture that if you talked about those numbers now with the average person, they would say that they seem reasonable. If you tell them that people are playing with the official numbers, they say, “Yep, I figured that. There are no great surprises there.” I guess what I am saying is that my work shows that the economic perceptions of non-professionals actually have some real validity; there are in fact reasons for the disconnect between official statistics and what the populous is feeling.