Really unbelievable. I can't see any reason for a revision this big as anything other than purposeful deception.
Plus, revisions are expected and normal. These stats are hard, and over time more data comes in about the past. What gets suspicious is how consistently the revisions are always in the direction of worse, for whatever "worse" is for the given metric. "Random" errors ought to be distributed more-or-less around zero. It indicates, if not proves, that there are more politics in these numbers than we'd like for supposedly objective metrics.
But... if you think about it hard enough, and perhaps have a dash of cynicism, it's what you'd expect. It just requires something that pretty much everyone reading this has personal experience of doing with their own managers. You know which direction to shade the results, to indicate how far the bug is towards being fixed or whatever. Nobody has to tell you. You figure it out pretty quickly.
Well, it's not just you and your manager.
There's a reason I grounded my cynicism is something that I defy anyone who has been working in a commercial environment for more than, say, a year, to say they haven't done. You've shaded the stats too. But people get this block where they think that there's some sort of boundary somewhere where people pass it and stop doing it. There isn't one. We're All Just Folk. That includes government economic statistics collectors as much as it includes your HOA as much as it includes you personally, dear reader. We're All Just Folk. There's no educational attainment, no level of responsibility, no certification, no amount of training that un-humans the humans. We're All Just Folk.
For example the famous 2% inflation goal is regularly presented as an apolitical target based on firm economic theory. In reality it was invented out of whole cloth for purely political reasons:
https://www.reuters.com/markets/mouse-that-roared-new-zealan...
What if, they asked, they just told everyone the rate should be much lower - say roughly 2% - and then aim for that?
"It was a bit of a shock to everyone, I think," said Roger Douglas, the Labour Party finance minister at the time who worked with the Treasury and Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) to pioneer the policy. "I just announced it was gonna be 2%, and it sort of stuck."
Like that, inflation targeting was born.
Earlier this year a gap opened up between what Americans were reporting in economic confidence surveys and the official stats. Historically they've tracked very tightly, almost in lockstep, so that gives some confidence in the official data. Then suddenly Biden was touting an amazing economy and the job numbers departed from what people were reporting as their on-the-ground impression. The cause is probably double counting due to remote work, zombie job ads and so on: lots of jobs that are being advertised but are duplicates or don't really exist, caused by a combination of the pandemic and new job board websites. But if you're on Team Biden are you going to prioritize figuring out why the gap between your data and public sentiment has appeared? Maybe making yourself look bad in the process? Or will you decide that there are more important priorities elsewhere? It's probably the latter and won't even feel political, just like it's the right thing to do. Of course because these are unarticulated decisions not policies, there's always a risk of some other process or person coming in and rearranging priorities for you, which maybe is what happened here.
For another example look at the UK. Their population statistics are a mess and have been for many years. At one point the ONS even reclassified them as experimental. If you're a strongly pro-mass migration politician or cabinet, are you going to be down at the ONS giving them hell about this every day? Probably not. It's not that the numbers are cooked, but more that problems arise that nobody cares to fix because the fix would create new problems for them.
e.g. Feb 2023:
> Overall, revisions to monthly growth in 2022 meant 311,000 more jobs were added last year than previously reported.
https://www.businessinsider.com/job-growth-unemployment-rate...
The surveys often seem to minimize both booms and busts, and the revisions tend to reinforce the trend.
That said, were consistent downward revisions last year historically anomolous? I've seen conspiracize so, charts et all. If true, then there's charitably some new artefact in system or uncharitably deception.
The employment numbers have been so sketchy that this was pretty much predicted by the people who looked at them
Such a big revision shows the Fed may already be behind with cuts. Odds were already 100% for a cut in Sept, this new data continues to move the odds up from 25bps to 50bps.
As an aside, big government conspiracies always make me laugh because they often come from the same people who say government is incompetent.
I don't expect numbers to be perfect, but with the amount of data access and computing we have, 28 percent off seems like a large amount.
If you could do a better job, I'm sure the Federal Reserve would be interested.
This is a ~30% miss for the year, which is historically large, but not egregious.
https://www.marquetteassociates.com/nonfarm-payroll-employme...
Believe it or not, I work at the BLS.
You can either choose accurate numbers or timely reports, but you can't have both.
If you want accuracy, then we need to wait for the QCEW report to be released. This is quarterly, so we wont know what the employment number for January is.. until possibly late April or Early May.
Do you care what employment was 5 months ago?
Thats why there is an annual benchmarking process, where we look back at the previous 5 quarters of QCEW data and are able to reconcile the differences.
The monthly estimation is like playing the "telephone" game. Maybe you played as a child. One person whispers a phrase into the ear of the person next to them and it gets whispered down a big line of people. Once at the end everybody laughs at how different the final phrase is compared to the original phrase.
The further away we get from the benchmarked data is the same as being further away from the first time the phrase was whispered - noise WILL enter the data - and it will begin to diverge from the "universe", or the original phrase in the telephone game.
There is no conspiracy. There are literally millions of businesses who report their employment data every month. There are easily 100+ eyes on the employment data at the BLS.
It is statistically impossible that all 100 BLS employees and the millions of reporters are all in a big "help Biden" conspiracy and there isn't a single iota of evidence or whisperings of a conspiracy.
Welcome to the nature of statistics!
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1exrj5u/comment/...
Or you could just assume everything is a stupid conspiracy
It's actually not. It's only unbelievable if you don't realize this happens literally all the time.
FTA: The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process
Annual process. It happens around this time every year.
> I can't see any reason for a revision this big as anything other than purposeful deception.
Your ignorance doesn't make it deception. The argument you are making here is that someone wanted to hide these figures until less than 100 days out from the election?
If you want to go down the road of conspiracy theories: Who would benefit from that, I wonder?
The reality is this is normal, and the only people raising a fuss about this are people who don't know this happens routinely and this is not abnormal, or people who have an agenda they are pushing through deception.
But let's say it's ordinary. I'll bet that if a different admin wins the election, the same people saying this is no big deal will make it a big deal, specially if it's around mid-term elections. That's just how it is.
Revisions happen every year. It is ordinary. It's so ordinary, that people were making predictions about these results months ago.
> I'll bet...
You'd be wrong. Because it has happened in the past, and no one is going on about conspiracy theories about us being lied to because it's dumb.
> That's just how it is.
No, it's not. Once again, you ignorance doesn't make something true.
And doubling down on that ignorance doesn't help you make your case.
The numbers were rosy but all the people I knew looking for jobs had a hard time landing things in contradiction of the numbers. People started doubting themselves. But I think to anyone it was obvious the numbers were wrong. In previous years, even 2022 and 2023, there was a constant stream of recruiters who late last year and all this year had dried up...
What matters to your social circle isn’t overall jobs but how well each sector is doing. LLM’s for example probably have negligible impact on 99% of the economy but that 1% has seen real disruption.
Also as far as I know historically, the Govt always publishes revisions publicly. It's just that people dont know about it and dont really care to learn.
EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
News, especially bad news (and when it comes to financials, news that falls outside expectations), is what gets reported. These revisions down are all over the news today.
EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
I can't find the web version for the day the original report came out, but in print the initial jobs report was on B1.
https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2024/03/09/todays-...
I'm not even sure if your conspiracy is that the government is cooking the books - or that newspapers are covering for Democrats.