People have been complaining about the horrible innacuracy of BLS statistics for quite a while now [1]. I wouldn't expect someone arguing open mindedly (as opposed to someone who already knows what he wants to say and only needs the reports that agree) to cite BLS.
I don't understand the criticism - the BLS preliminary estimates disagreed with "TrimTabs" estimates by 1.1%, therefore the BLS is horribly inaccurate? According to the article you cite, the BLS final estimates differed from the "TrimTabs" estimates by 0.5%.
Further, I'm not sure how TrimTab's "real time tax data" could possibly measure unemployment - how does TrimTabs know whether someone is looking for work?
I just showed one article and obviously didn't dig too deeply in it. I've been hearing complaints about BLS as long as I've known about BLS and my quick google search was a page of blog posts/articles complaining about it.
>how does TrimTabs know whether someone is looking for work?
How does BLS? By seeing how many people claim benefits? What about those who aren't eligible?
So their just asking people. You know that it's been demonstrated that people will even lie about their personal lives when they believe they are completely anonymous right?
Of course I do: based on everything I've seen in my life and the people I actually know. Not based on some report that never seems to agree with actual "in the field" data.
My experience disagrees with your experience, again based on my own life and people I actually know.
The data, broadly speaking, matches up with my experience -- "some report" agrees with my "in the field" data, and with yummyfajitas' "in the field" data, and many others' "in the field" data. "Scalzi's article describes a fairly atypical poverty experience"; you and Scalzi are the outliers, not the norm.
