If I was going to try and deceive someone, I probably wouldn't publish a revision contradicting my previous numbers. I'd publish something saying the previous numbers were correct.
If you want to keep posting numbers that show that some metric is getting better and better, you are mathematically forced to go back and reset the baselines every so often, because otherwise you're going to claim that the United States has a billion and a half jobs before long.
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.
The fact that revisions tend to be in one direction should tell us there’s probably some systemic/procedural reason for it, not that it’s political. I’m certainly cynical about politics, but the political explanation here just clearly doesn’t make sense.
What's jerf is saying is that the systems and procedures end up being selected (to some extent maybe unconsciously) based on political considerations. This isn't a radical view. Economists and many other kinds of academics have a long history of adapting ideas, metrics and systems to please political masters. Or more accurately, to appear useful to political masters.
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:
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."
I think I understand what you're saying. Rather than "The Biden admin cooked the initial numbers to make themselves look good", it's more "The process for generating the initial numbers has been influenced by politics over the years to favor initially higher numbers." That does make sense and is certainly a possible and perhaps partial explanation for what's going on.
Yes and it's not specific to the US or any specific administration. It's also not in this case a long term thing, the problem has appeared quite recently.
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.
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.
But then you can get caught for lying or at least being incompetent, instead of just playing it off as "statistics is hard :(" If the initial claims get more press than the revisions, then it pays off. I'm really curious how often the revised figures are worse, rather than better. I have a feeling the revised figures are always worse for whatever administration is in power.
Run with bogus numbers, let the narrative set in, release revised numbers, and they hurt you for a few days but are quickly forgotten. Especially if they are released during the middle of your convention where every major outlet is absorbed with releasing puff pieces about how the VP pick is "America's dad".
Less cynical is they were crossing their fingers things would go back up. Kind of like a day trader in the red, keep on betting because eventually things will go up --maybe just not in time... this time.
Basically. Put out 10 headlines of job growth to set expectations -> market behaviour. Last part important because you can keep economy humming for some time via perception management and collective delusion. Which affects voter sentiment during election season. Have media that favours you, which MSM does dems, not emphasis revisions in news cycle. It's not about fearing getting caugh because BLS is "transparent", transparency matters much less when you have influence/control over setting news agenda.
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.
I have the counter-reaction - this is incredibly complex data that has to be collected, and expecting it to be perfectly correct immediately every quarter is kind of nuts.
Yeah, I thought it was well known that the data is messy. They make educated guesses off the data they have monthly, and then continue to clean it up as they get more data.
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.
What would be the point of releasing good numbers a year before the election and then forcing yourself to release worse numbers just a couple months before the election?
This observation should be really obvious. The people who think this is nefarious believe they are thinking critically. What they fail to realize is that they are skipping the part where they critically examine their own thought process.
Surely revising the numbers downward close to election when people are paying most attention to them is exactly the opposite thing you would want to do to get re-elected? I'd argue the motivation for malfeasance only makes sense the opposite -- BLS does not want the administration reelected and thus is releasing worse numbers close to the election.
The scandal of never having released the numbers and a future administration finding out and publicizing it is way worse than just admitting it up front and hoping no one cares. Mark my words, when it comes to media pundits, they'll still use the old numbers from the original publications, and everyone will just go along. That's how these things work.
One non-boogeywoman scenario is that they were hoping the numbers would reverse and look good --so they bet things would get better, but they didn't. It's a chance people will take, sometimes.
Well a simple (cynical) take is that the current administration is no longer up for re-election, they’ve been replaced by a new candidate and so now it’s okay to blame the current administration.
Harris is literally the VP and takes an active role in advising and perhaps even running the current administration. Yes, she's not president, but one would hope the second-in-command would be taking on some responsibility in the administration. Thus, she very much shares this administration's success and failures.
"By the current administration to get re-elected" how? Without more specifics, this is a statement you could write about literally anything the current administration is doing or not doing, so it has no explanatory power at all.
how would releasing this new info be helpful? or are you saying this latest release is not by the current administration but the previous inaccurate release is?
I'm saying the Biden administration is ultimately honest of their own accord, but they rush to publish numbers and the media rushes to publicize the original numbers, in such a way as to make people overestimate jobs created. I've talked with people who will still cite old jobs numbers as reasons that Harris should be re-elected.
The article doesn't suggest doing this would have helped the current administration at all. Considering this was always going to get corrected around this time, quite the opposite. Any objective look at this is going to suggest it doesn't help the current administration get elected. So if we are considering conspiracy theories...
These numbers are calculated with a lot of statistical inference. That means, among other things, that the numbers calculated at the start of a downturn end up being way off because the markets change quicker than calculations of trends.
I think politicians desperately want to report only positive news, and with the election coming up, it might make it easy for them to overlook certain ethical parameters. I don't know if this was purposeful deception, perhaps optimistic deception is a better way of putting it.
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.
While we need to hold data to the highest standard, these wild thoughts without proof are dangerous. The new norm of suggesting conspiracies without any evidence is a scary future for me.
> The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process in which monthly estimates, based on surveys, are reconciled with more accurate but less timely records from state unemployment offices. The new figures, once finalized, will be incorporated into official government employment statistics early next year.
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.
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...
These numbers have very little to do with a small sample of people looking for a job. Something like ~5-10 million people are looking for work at any given time, this is changes that by about 0.07 million per month.
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.
I’m not making any claims about the quality or types of jobs added, just that they were. You can read the BLS publication for that kind of information.
What would be the point of the deception? To keep rates high? Politically it would be very stupid (dropping a bomb 100 days before a national election).
So this is the first time I've seen it on the front page of the NYTimes. The Biden administration has been doing this consistently for years now and normally it's buried deep inside.
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.
It's not a conspiracy. It's just something I've noticed when talking to people. They will happily cite the jobs number that came out in the original report and then look blankly at you when you mention the revision. To me that indicates an imbalance.
Im having a hard time taking this comment seriously when this article is on the front page
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.
I never said the gov't doesn't publish them. I just said papers don't report them prominently. This is the first time I've seen it on the front page, despite similar corrections being made.
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 just said papers don't report them prominently.
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.
