Can anyone comment as to how this might have occurred? Was it a mistake or just late data? At the time I read the article, it didn’t have these details.
They're just the results of surveys. They get revised twice after the first report, and there's also a yearly adjustment based on unemployment benefits numbers. Revisions of over 100,000 are not that uncommon. (500,000 is pretty rare though!) https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/jobs-report-growth-unem...
Surveys, yes, but also corroborated by interagency reports, many of which are behind schedule do to a prolonged federal shutdown in December 2018 and January 2019. Some offices have been behind schedule on reporting since returning to work in February.
> Revisions of over 100,000 are not that uncommon. (500,000 is pretty rare though!)
Those are monthly numbers. The 500k should probably be anchored to the last revision, I guess a year ago. (Also, I saw somewhere that this 500k represents 0.3% of the entire employee base.)
The top level of US federal agencies has been a skeleton crew since 2017. Much of the reported data was supposed to have been provided by agencies which have been hamstrung due to a lack of leadership in appointed positions. Whether intentionally or not, many of those appointed positions are those that carry the responsibility of ensuring that the congressional mandates of the agency are carried out. Without appointed officials in those positions, that duty falls to "acting" personnel who essentially end up working two full-time jobs. In some agencies this problem is magnified because acting personnel are not authorized to hire administrative support staff. Imagine a company like Facebook eliminating their entire upper management and allowing randomly selected employees to fill in for those positions, whether they are qualified or not.
You'd be surprised how infrequently someone does a basic sanity check on the voluminous economic numbers published by the government, all of which are derived from models (probably in a spreadsheet somewhere). Every so often a fresh pair of eyes in the government will notice an obvious flaw in the output of the model, which typically causes a one-time correction to be issued but they don't necessarily retroactively fix previous official numbers. Most of these errors happen with numbers that are sufficiently obscure and specialized that it isn't newsworthy.
The underlying methodology for the BLS model is prone to serious bias and brittle. You can see this in the level of disagreement between the BLS numbers and the widely cited ADP numbers. The ADP numbers also have significant fundamental bias, but it is an entirely different kind of bias so both models capture effects that are largely invisible to the other. For Americans in most parts of the US, I think the ADP numbers are a bit closer to ground truth but take either with a large grain of salt.
The agency was recently moved and lost a huge part of their staff, they're not going to be as competent as they used to be. The same things is happening to the USDA.
I was going to cite the USDA as my primary example. I have been hearing a lot of this from ARS, FSA and NRRL, and although their specific problems are different there is a definitely a common theme. The USDA NRRL type culture collection is currently slated to be autoclaved and shut down, which would destroy the only known publically available reference samples of many industrially and medically important microorganisms, including many that are critical to food safety testing and the original source of antibiotic compounds (the original source of pennicillin is in that collection).
> Insanity is the wrong term, because it would imply repeating something that has already failed
No it doesn't. You might be thinking of that meme often miss-attributing that alternative definition as an Einstein wisdom; but that quote is about as accurate as the claim of who said it.
It has been a part of every budget proposal since 2017. It was only removed from the FY2020 list this past March as part of a deal to get the budget passed:
This really sucks because the USDA has an amazing food database of nutrition information. Its pretty much what I rely on for maintaining my renal diet. I can't even find such a complete list in other countries (if someone knows inform me!) https://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/search/list
Well, they always revise the numbers. I assume it's because they send out surveys, and more answers are always trickling back in. Maybe the late responses were far different than the first ones this time for some reason?
I've noticed these revisions from time to time. Is there anywhere that tracks them? I'd be curious to know how often positive figures are not so positive?
I don't know if these numbers and their subsequent revisions are always available in a table. I did find something that looks like the source of this article, and the website seems to have some mention of having data publicly available [0]. Maybe the past press releases/statements are also archived?
Where do these figures come from in the first place? Are they based on W-2 filings? Who notifies the federal government when I leave my job? How can anyone independently verify these figures are accurate?
For those who aren't familiar and haven't read the link, most initial BLS data is derived from surveys, not from W2 + 1099 filings. As such, it's an indicator, not the whole truth.
Assuming these figures report thousands, nothing really jumps out as being >500, expansion year or not - 2009 included.
Edit:
I suspect the article is reporting total jobs, not jobs change, but I'm not sure. The BLS link appears to be reporting change in nonfarm employment. Surprisingly poor labeling of data sets in both cases.
