----- Original Message ----- From: "Christian Gregory" <christian11 at mindspring.com>
>And I am still supposed to take the BLS numbers as gospel?
-Can you read? No one has been saying that you should take the BLS numbers
as
-gospel. Your main complaint is that _others_ (ie the lay people, as you
called them,
-and perhaps the media) take them as gospel when they shouldn't. But you
disguised
-that as a criticism of BLS methodology, which it's clear you really don't
care about,
-even enough to look at what's clearly posted on their website.
-Again, if people chose to ignore what the BLS numbers are, then your quibble is with -them, not BLS. Your main criticism of BLS seems to be that the numbers come from -government-employed, pointy-headed statisticians, who are inherently untrustworthy -because they don't live with the "real" people that the economy effects, like you do. -That's a posture, Nathan, not a criticism.
How you derive any of the above from what I said, I'm not sure. I very clearly was criticizing adjustments to the raw numbers as inherently problematic, since if they adjustments have systematic problems, then the bouncing around of numbers are going to be systematically wrong. So on top of the seasonal adjustment problems and the "sampling" problems-- both of which I acknowledge it would be nice to account for --you will have not a statistical "fix" further distorting the numbers, creating a third distortion of the numbers.
You and Doug have great faith that the statisticians are just fixing the seasonal and sampling problems inherent in the jobs numbers. I don't, which is why I posted the Crudele analysis in the first place. As to why the problem exists, I specifically said I don't think it's because of political bias. I just think the government underinvests in collecting good economic information and that the data is not what is needed for managing a modern economy. It's pathetic what this country exists in statistical information. Businesses like Wal-Mart invest larger chunks of their available capital on information, because they believe that those investments will help save them far more money than they spend. Yet the US government continues to starve information-collecting agencies far below their requests for additional funding.
So they end up making pretty speculative adjustments to the numbers that, given a shifting economy, may retroactively be "correct" for the past, but are unlikely to be correct as the next turn in economic change undermines the statistical assumptions of their model.
Nathan Newman