Meanwhile, a separate government survey of establishment payrolls shows that the U.S. economy gained 800,000 jobs over the two years after the recession. The household survey measures employed people, while the establishment survey measures nonfarm payroll jobs.

“The gold standard for employment trends is simply the payroll survey, and I literally can’t recall anybody using the full-time number from the household survey to compare cyclical job-trends anytime before, and I’ve seen a lot of such comparisons,” said Josh Bivens, director of research and policy at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal-leaning think tank based in Washington.