(FORTUNE Magazine) – Bill Klem, immortal umpire, is famous for saying, ''I call 'em as I see 'em.'' The present fan never could figure out what was so memorable about this line, but at least he knew Bill's basic principles. Strikes were pitches that crossed all or part of the plate not higher than the batter's shoulders and not lower than his knees, and balls were everything else. With the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, things are much less clear. The seven academic economists who make up the committee get to call the beginnings and ends of recessions -- and the Commerce Department accepts their calls as official -- but nobody knows what they mean by a recession. Irksome, eh? Question: Are we in a recession right now? Most folks would say no, we are in a somewhat sluggish recovery. But it is not hard to find public figures (e.g., Representative Thomas J. Downey of New York, writing in the June 25 Christian Science Monitor) still casually assuming we are in a recession. No member of the NBER committee appears to believe this, and at least one member (Geoffrey Moore of Columbia University) has said publicly that he believes the recession ended more than a year ago. So why does it take so long to get the official call? Because the committee as a whole believes we might still be in a recession. If it were sure we were not, it would have met and voted to say when the economy bottomed out. (As of June 26, no meeting was scheduled.) Given the bobs and weaves and double-dip problems of the economy this past year, the caution seems reasonable enough. What is harder to accept is the committee's evident unwillingness to state exactly what has to happen before the recession will be declared kaput. Robert Hall of Stanford, the committee chairman, argues that it is foolish to demand formulaic answers to such questions -- that only a judgmental approach can capture the complexities of the U.S. economy. In a recent issue of the NBER Reporter, he elaborated this case by pointing to various special events surrounding the committee's last call -- its April 1991 judgment that the economy had slid into recession in July 1990. This call was complicated, he wrote, by the familiar difficulty that ''different cyclical indicators have different turning points.'' But what is to prevent the committee from nevertheless specifying some (presumably weighted) mixture of indicators it regards as decisive? And if it cannot do this, why should kibitzers not feel free to identify the ultimate judgments as arbitrary? From talking to some committee members, we have the distinct impression that the profs do not typically start out in agreement when they foregather to vote on recessions and expansions -- which is what you would expect, given their wobbly standards. But ultimately they manage to find a compromise they can all vote for, possibly because they understand that divisions would instantly undermine their collective authority. Bill Klem would have snorted.