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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Hasn't this been part for the course for the last year or so? It seems like every jobs report is lowered after the news cycle picks up the inflates numbers and they're free to adjust to the real data.

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This has been a thing for more than just a couple years [0]. Maybe there is nothing nefarious with correcting the original estimations when more information is known later on.

[0] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/half-million...

You'll always find one-off examples. The link below was shared in a separate thread here, the trend line for the 12-month average of revisions looks pretty noticeably different since Jan 2023. Historically it seems like they pretty regularly estimated low and revised higher, and the 12-month average going back to 1988 was towards revisions upwards (ignoring economic shocks of 2008 and 2020).

https://en.macromicro.me/charts/99068/nonfarm-payrolls-month...

I see up and down revisions with pockets of each all over this graph. This does not seem to present a strong argument that the Biden administration is actively lying about jobs data.

The 12-month average has been negative since January of 2023. Their zoom on mobile doesn't work very well, I earlier missed a similar year or so of negative 12-month averages around 2016, but in general going back to the late 80s the adjustments seem to have heavily favored the side of adjusting up rather than down.

Its not a huge indicator and I didn't imply anything should be read into it, but it is an interesting change in the long-term pattern worth looking into.

> I didn't imply anything should be read into it

FYI, this sentence -- "It seems like every jobs report is lowered after the news cycle picks up the inflates numbers and they're free to adjust to the real data" -- gave me the sense that you meant the numbers were manipulated to put out good news. I think that's what the other poster was picking up on.

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