Funny enough, the proposals here remind me an article on site metrics I read recently. To rephrase the relevant bit, "99.9..% uptime is highly misleading if a small number of your customers are simply down all the time."

Unemployment has a long-known flaw cited in the article, especially relevant in this economy: the significant number of adults who have simply given up looking for work, considering it hopeless, and who are therefore not counted in the unemployment statistics.

Any metric gives you just a tiny, keyhole-like view on the world. A big part of the battle is then to understand what your metrics are blinding you to.