Caller ID Is Destroying Our Understanding of the Jobs Market

The UK’s Office for National Statistics used to knock on doors and ask people if they were employed, as a traditional way of compiling the country’s labor market data.

But when Covid-19 forced social distancing in 2020, door-knocking was out. At one point during the pandemic, the survey was reliant on how many phone numbers it could find for a representative sample — and also on people actually answering their mobile phones when an unknown number called. Only a quarter of Britons say they answer such calls, with most wary of scams. Fewer that half of UK households have a landline, and those numbers ...