Was the Real Jobs Revision Negative 818,000 or Negative 915,000? | Hacker News Reader

Was the Real Jobs Revision Negative 818,000 or Negative 915,000?

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53 pointsmakaimc37 comments

You could ask the secretary of commerce, but I suspect she doesn't know.

https://x.com/greg_price11/status/1826378177754935482

This guys posting history is extremely partisan, it really undermines the message

Do you think the video is a deep fake because you don’t like Republicans?

The cut makes it sound like she “isn’t familiar” with the Bureau of Labor. I assume she said “with that figure” or something of the sort :)

It’s a bad response, but also not surprising, since her job is to be ra-ra-ra. (Which isn’t me excusing her, not by any means.)

Indeed. Given the cut, and not being able to find this interview elsewhere, I don't put much stock in this video.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/examining-vp-harris-ec...

Thanks! Good to know it wasn't cut to misrepresent the quote. I still don't think she meant she's unfamiliar with the Bureau of Labor, rather that specific issue.

No, I don't think the video is a deep fake. What I think is this guy is clearly a troll whose concerns about job number revisions are clearly disingenuous. I think when you include hyper-partisan framing around your message, it undermines the message then if you had just presented it directly.

It's also not Republicans that I don't like, it's the professional concern trolls that I don't care for.

That sir is called an ad hominem. Judge the information, not the messenger.

I do generally agree with such approach - information, not messenger. However there's a concept of reputation which doesn't go away in many cases - and this could be one of them.

So, someone's reputation matters when they post a video of someone else? Can you not just judge the video for yourself and seek more context if you need it?

Post history has importance when considering whether someone’s ignorantly sharing partisan propaganda or not. Don’t feed trolls.

I feel like I'm being trolled left and right here.

>Post history has importance when considering whether someone’s ignorantly sharing partisan propaganda or not.

Yes but it doesn't tell you whether the thing is good information or not! Not everything that is "propaganda" is bad information. Especially in cases of "partisan" issues, you have to look at both sides of it because it often happens that one side denies or misrepresents the other side. I can't believe I have to explain all of this...

Reputation matters when the listener decides what to do with the message. Are those the facts, are enough facts fairly represented. Judging a video could be complicated if you don't know - or can reliably estimate - those things, and if you need more context all the time, it's becoming pretty hard to watch videos. Hence reputation.

Fair enough, it is actually work to do research. But that doesn't make the video wrong. People have time to comment on here and talk crap about a source, but not a few minutes to watch a video and find out possibly insightful information. I think people have wrong priorities here, and the real objectives of comments about reputation are to prevent other people from watching the very thing that you don't feel like watching, and farm internet points in the process.

I'm not saying the video is wrong. I'm saying that often when you have to consider the message, to understand the message, to put it into perspective you need to understand the messenger. If you have one part of information readily available and another part not, you may register the information as a sort of "conditional" one - you don't "feel" a good understanding of it. For example, if you convey this information to somebody else, can you answer basic questions about that? If not, then maybe you don't have a good understanding. The mentioning in this branch is that who's the messenger could be important to understand the message, and the previous history is what you may rely on.

300%. It's not a fallacy to understand the biases of the information you are consuming. If someone looks bad because of their past that's important reader context.

It's a fallacy to use personage as a sole reason to disagree. But it's damned good to have context. This whole social media thing is such a quagmire imo in large part because every tweet comes across naked, that no matter how low your character or how much you've distorted and manipulated in the past, each tweet is a totally fresh chance to do to again with no one the wiser. We seriously need systems for establishing context, and it's a public service to earn each other about patterns of distortion & ultra-bias.

The sad thing is that she’s one of the smarter ones in the Biden-Harris administration.

Let’s not forget that the Biden-Harris CHAIR of the Council of Economic Advisors doesn’t have the faintest idea of how government borrowing or expansion of the money supply works. https://x.com/findingmoneydoc/status/1786050601236779078?s=4...

https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesprelbmk.htm

Some interesting charts https://fred.stlouisfed.org/categories/32444

The massive decline in employment of disabled workers is the most concerning thing I saw.

Newb question: Are revisions of this scale normal for jobs data?

It's unusual: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/08/21/us-job-growth-revised-down-b...

Also unusual is the study pacing of the downward revisions which has been going on during the current administration. I believe I read somewhere that there have been more negative revisions in a row under Biden than any previous president.

People who follow job State and know that the numbers were messed up because the household survey shows quite a different story.

You can also add into the swelter of government data that most of the jobs created since 2019 have gone to foreign-born people. I don't have anything against people not born in America having a job, I just find it suspect that they are driving out American job seekers so handily.

The main job of a government is to look after those people who elected it -its constituency. If there is a deficit of job seekers, then by all means, import the labor, but the government should not allow foreign workers to undermine its own constituency. I mean, unless, we get something in return from the foreign governments --I don't mean cheaper clothing or cheaper labor. If we went all the way for that, we'd reach a global equilibrium where everyone would earn $1/hr --I doubt anyone but foreigners earning less than a $1 per hour would want that, but you never know, some people do go against their own self interest.

It is trivial to make the case that you need to import your labor in the tech sector. They are incentivized to hire outside since the visa/h1b stipulations make their new worker a step above an indentured worker.

The incentives for corporations are misaligned with the constituency as well, and from my perspective they work together to rule in the modern day. A corporation can run away from a country they created, a citizen cannot do so as readily.

Revisions are normal, although 800k is fairly high. Most of this scale are usually 200k-300k, though in 2019 we had a revision of ~500k.

> fairly high

Very high. Largest since -824,000 in 2009. "Great recession" and all that.

You can decide for yourself if the initial numbers may have been intentionally over-reported to enable media outlets to publish articles and op-eds about how great the economy is under certain politicians, and then have the "correction" in fine print months later, where very few people will notice.

I feel like if this was the case the truth wouldn’t come out this close to an election. It really just shows how inept the government can be.

The release date of the annual revision is known well in advance, it's in August every year.

There’s a larger revision in 2021, but it happens to be in the other direction.

The adjustment was less than 1% on data that is always adjusted as far as I can tell. Pre-Covid the adjustment in this story, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-created-500000-fewer-jo..., was 500k jobs.

Given the history of this type of figure and reporting I don’t buy that argument at all. The correction is everywhere today, on all the news networks just as it has been in the past.

It is always adjusted, but as noted, not always downwards, and almost never to this degree. Your claim about 2021 is incorrect.

As far as 1%, nobody cares about the total number of jobs, the only thing that matters is the number added or lost. This revision corrects about a 40% overstatement over the latest full year of monthly reports.

This is news for one day. A booming economy, massive job growth, etc has been the reporting for over a year. Do you expect the President to return to the convention and correct his own speech from Monday?

It's been happening for a few years. It's unacceptable yet commonplace. But hey, at least they did revise it!

The biggest issue is that the model for births/deaths of employers was wrong and over-estimating the number of employers. This accounted for about half the revision.

https://www.atlantafed.org/-/media/documents/research/public...

This also means that the other side of the Jobs Report, the household survey, or CPS, is undercounting employment by ~3 million, but that one never gets revised.

Some revisions yes, but this is a big one. This discrepancy is because the initial numbers are determined based on surveys and the later revised numbers use more reliable but more slowly updated IRS reporting. (I believe)

These numbers are calculated, at least initially, as statistical constructions based on trends. That means that when markets changes abruptly, such as in the most recent months, the actual job numbers fall much farther than predictions.

Does this give us any indication of the chance of a recession?

Yes. It indicates there is one. If you review the numbers, it's clear they are cheesing the numbers. It's a bit like national debt. In national debt, if you owe $100 today, you will owe $200 tomorrow, $300 the next day, and so on -- debt accumulates in a cumulative manner.

So for unemployment the plan is to cheese the numbers, to accumulate, in a similar fashion. When Kamala wins, and Trump triggers the riots, they'll have a snatch & power grab and punt all the job losses to the other team. Then, thusly, the employment debt is eliminated.

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