Also, the idea that people who are not actively looking for employment (not going to a state employment security office since it doesn't help them to find work and it is not giving them money to show up) as not being among the unemployed is obviously absurd. It extends, once again, the myth of individual choice in determining one's place in society. So the fuck to all those who just can't find work and have given up on finding it using official means, they aren't unemployed. They can just join the ranks of the uncounted 'unpeople'. But you can be sure these very same unpeople do go back into the work force when the right work and the right rate are available (their area becomes a boom area for example), and they probably do it without any contact with a state employment office whatsoever.
It would seem all the countries I've found data on are using this sort of survey and generalizing from it. My hunch is that those countries with activist and effective national governments (France, Japan--and Japan counts everything by households, everyone counted is in a household that has been accounted for ) are better at figuring out unemployment than those that are not. In other words, I still have my doubts about the US federal government. It is far better at determining who is 'officially' employed than in any possible sense of the word determining who is unemployed, underemployed or a non-person, and it probably doesn't really care to anyway.
Perhaps if there were higher unemployment among statisticians and economists, there might be more calls for a real world definition and a more accurate count.
Charles Jannuzi