Now, there is another metric showing bigger job losses than the payroll survey, and that's the second of the two B.L.S. methods mentioned above. The Current Population Survey, a monthly survey of 50,000 households carried out by the Census Bureau for the B.L.S., indicates that the economy has lost 828,000 jobs during the current downturn compared with the 463,000 the payroll survey shows.

But you won't find too many of these critics pointing to the household survey to support their argument. The reason?

Back when the economy was growing, the household survey detected much bigger job gains than the payroll survey. Since most critics can be described as perma-bears, they spent a good bit of time arguing that the household survey was bunk. Perhaps they think it would be unseemly to flip-flop to now say it's good.

But all of this is not to say that government statistics don't need improvement; they surely do. Even our current Federal Reserve chairman, Ben S. Bernanke, has thought so.

But his predecessor, former chairman Alan Greenspan, perhaps said it best in 1997, referring to another important data point, the gross domestic product:

"I think we are getting to the point...when we will have to move unless very clear evidence emerges that the expansion is easing significantly. I don't mean evidence that G.D.P. growth is moderating to 1¾ percent or whatever the forecast is. The G.D.P. is a nice number and it does have some relationship to the real world. I'm not terribly certain what it is, though everyone tells me it does."