Last year, Gary Cohn, the president and chief operating officer of Goldman Sachs Group Inc. whom President-elect Donald Trump has chosen to be his top economic policy adviser, declared that the official U.S. unemployment rate -- 5.5 percent at the time he spoke -- was "very, very fictitious."
Cohn was speaking at the Jack Welch College of Business at Sacred Heart University in Connecticut. Welch, the former General Electric Co. chief executive officer, is the fellow who made the infamous -- and unsubstantiated -- accusation in 2012 that "the Chicago guys" were messing with the unemployment numbers to help Barack Obama get re-elected. Cohn was suggesting something less sinister -- that the unemployment rate was "only that low because the participation rate has gone downward." Only those who are actively looking for jobs count as unemployed; labor-force dropouts don't. Explained Cohn:
