[lbo-talk] employment

[Nathan Newman]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Christian Gregory" <christian11 at mindspring.com>
>As for the criticism that these are based on "statistical games"--I >guess
it depends on what you mean by games. The model they use >is a non-sampling
model, but it has to be, since new firms take a >while to be included in
the sample. But the model they use is based >on historical data and update
it quarterly. I don't know what else >you're expecting. Perhaps you could
elaborate?

Look, I don't want to play a layman on these issues, since I'm not, but
most people sort of expect when they hear "90,000 jobs were created last
month" that this means that the Commerce Department went out and found that
many new jobs, period.  All adjustments add to the uncertainty that the
numbers reported reflect reality rather than problems in the statistical
adjustments.

Of course, the raw numbers can be deceptive as well in how we interpret
them due to what is not sampled in the jobs report.

But the statistical adjustments do lead a lot of folks to wonder how much
change in the economy is due to underlying reality and how much is due to
odd statistical decisions made by the government statisticians.

Doug may feel that Crudele is accusing the BLS of political complicity with
Bush, which I am not, but I have far less confidence that they've got the
stats "right."  I attribute this far more to poor funding of the
statistical agencies, so they depend on poor data and have to extrapolate
from there, but it's a problem that we are making large economic decisions
based on pretty poor data.

nathan Newman