A survey by Ipsos Mori (a social research institute), reveals public understanding of the numbers behind the daily news in 14 countries. The majority of the countries got it wrong on issues such as unemployment, which is overestimated to be three times higher than the actual rate. Such misperceptions occur around the world and can have a significant impact as politicians focus on voter perceptions.

In my opinion this goes to show how strong of an impact unemployment has on certain nations. Since in economics perceptions often lead to self-fulfilling prophesies, these statistics are pretty disturbing.

Actually, I think the moral of this story is that people are not fooled by government statistics that try to put a better face on the situation than what really exists. There is a lot of hidden unemployment or underemployment that goes unreported. Now whether that is somewhat beneficial due to the self-fulfilling prophecies mentioned by Christian, I will let politicians debate.

Adam, I agree with your point about hidden un- and under-employment. But an average guess for the US of 32% seems over the top, even with those concepts in the mix.