There are many who have expressed doubt about the validity of the nation’s official unemployment rate. Some, like former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, have suggested that government statisticians have been exaggerating job growth for political purposes.
As pointed out by writer David Leonhardt, both Republican and Democratic economists have dismissed those assertions as silly. But that doesn’t mean that the official unemployment rate measure is accurate. In fact, a new academic paper suggests that the unemployment rate appears to have become less accurate over the last two decades, in part because of the rise of survey non-responsiveness. Declining response rates to surveys of almost all kinds have emerged as among the biggest issues in the social sciences.
The rise of caller ID and the decline of land lines play a role of course, but so does dwindling trust in American institutions, including government, the media, religious institutions, financial firms and schools. According to Pew, in 1997, the response rate to a typical telephone poll was a healthy 36 percent. By 2012, the response rate had plummeted to just 9 percent. The response rate of the Labor Department’s monthly jobs survey is far higher, but has also declined in recent decades.
