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Comment by trust_bt_verify | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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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