Article • Dean Baker’s Beat the Press
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Meyerson was trying to make the point that Germany is doing better than the U.S. in spite of its generous welfare state and lower level of inequality. But he used the official German unemployment rate to make his case, telling readers that Germany’s unemployment rate was 6.5 percent in October. The OECD reports that Germany’s harmonized unemployment rate, which uses the same methodology as the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the United States, was 5.5 percent in October. The OECD data makes his case even stronger. This is the same mistake made by the NYT today.