
Media Continues to Misreport US Unemployment Numbers - jules-jules
https://wolfstreet.com/2020/07/23/media-continues-to-misreport-unemployment-claims-31-8-million-people-on-state-federal-unemployment-insurance-week-18-of-u-s-labor-market-collapse/
======
mywittyname
> There are 160 million people in the civilian labor force, according to the
> Bureau of Labor Statistics (not that this number can be trusted)

I really don't understand why people write articles using data they don't find
trustworthy, yet assert that their own article is trustworthy. Garbage-in,
garbage-out. I see this a lot when it comes to unemployment in particular.

What's more likely, everyone whose job it is to report on unemployment figures
gets them wrong, while some rando on the internet is the only one to get it
right, or the other way around?

You can go here [1] and select number of people who have been unemployed for
various durations. Number of people unemployed for between 5 and 14 weeks has
decreased rather dramatically in June. Granted, the figures are still absurdly
high, but it does suggest that people are getting back to work.

Also, take a close look at "Unemployed for 15 Weeks & over" figures from 2010.
The economy maintained ~8-9 million unemployed people for years during the
great recession. So the 11 million that's being reported now is high, but they
aren't so much worse than our last recession.

[1] [https://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/surveymost?ln](https://data.bls.gov/cgi-
bin/surveymost?ln)

~~~
elipsey
TLDR; Rushed journalists didn't understand complicated new reporting format at
first.

He didn't say data was untrustworthy, he said the reporters were in a hurry.

Per author: Reporters have a 30 minute window between receiving the report and
the expiration of embargo. The format changed because we are giving a new kind
of unemployment payment. The data is complicated and the aggregate of the new
PEUC+state unemployment claims number is several pages into the report.

~~~
mywittyname
My quote is one of a few in that article where he specifically calls out the
BLS data as untrustworthy as a whole. He's absolutely not _just_ taking issue
with journalists.

He makes the complaint you identified, that the journalist are misreporting
figures. But then he says that the labor department is intentionally
misleading people. He then complains about how seasonal adjustments shouldn't
be applied, when is maybe fair, but the difference is literally a rounding
error between the two -- 1.4 million (seasonally adjusted) vs 1.4 million
(unajusted).

He then proceeds to say that the BLS civilian labor force numbers can't be
trusted. Discusses how "fraudulant claims" are inflating numbers. Then
provides his own figure (sourced from BLS) is more accurate than the,
"nonsense produced these days by the Bureau of Labor Statistics."

~~~
elipsey
Ok. Maybe I'm misunderstanding the author. Let's take those quotes in context
from the conclusion of the article:

"There are numerous factors that overstate and understate the actual number of
unemployed, and we’re not able to pin them all down. I mentioned seasonal
adjustments as one of those factors.

But there are also fraudulent claims that overstate claims data. And then
there are claims that have been denied for various reasons, often due to
mismatched information from the employer that take weeks or months to sort
out. And they would understate unemployment. Then there are states that still
don’t process all federal claims. And even states that do process them, do so
inconsistently. Then there are people who don’t qualify for unemployment
insurance, and when they lose their work, they don’t count here at all.

But give or take maybe 1 million people, the total number of unemployed still
hovers around 32 million. That’s the number to go by, not the fallen-off-the-
cliff nonsense produced these days by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in its
now ludicrously distorted survey-based jobs report."

I take "there are also fraudulent claims that overstate claims data" to mean
that some non-zero number of "fraudulent claims" presumably are counted in the
set of all unemployment claims, and that this is one of several subtleties in
the data that might contribute to marginally both under- and over-reporting.

It seems to me that BLS is just one of the reporting entities, and that the
survey results they provide are regarded by the author as incomplete an
unreliable self-report, but not that all of the various sources are providing
unreliable data (although it’s not clear exactly how it is all collated). Is
that incorrect?

------
phonon
Article is idiotic.

1\. The federal claims are ones that would not ordinarily be accepted for
State unemployment (e.g. contract workers). It would be irresponsible to
compare UI claims YoY that have vastly different criteria.

2\. That being said, obviously there is increased unemployment amongst people
who would ordinarily not qualify for UI.

3\. Seasonal adjustments are small, why even mention them.

4\. _None_ of this is the BLS Unemployment survey numbers from the Current
Population Survey (the "headline" unemployment rate you see in the news),
which is exactly that; a survey that asks people if they are
unemployed/underemployed/seeking work. (Which has its own, quite separate
methodologies.) [1]

[1]
[https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm)

------
zalkota
Political agendas

