>The monthly employment estimates and the household surveys are giving
>completely different messages each month. Last month, there were massive
>job gains according to the household survey. Now, there's little doubt
>that the establishment survey is more reliable,
That's a big change from what you've been arguing.
> but it's not "creationism"
>to suspect that there are statistical problems in the establishment survey
>given these wide divergences.
You're not doing a very good job of specifying what those problems are. Is it the birth/death model? The technique of seasaonal adjustment? The household data is seasonally adjusted too.
The HH survey showed big headline gains (and to be comparable to the payroll survey, make sure you're using nonag HH). But these were heavily concentrated in part-time work and self-employment - and were mostly gained by workers with a high-school diploma or less. So the skew was towards some fairly shitty jobs.
>And to repeat, you just can't convince me that the statistics are accurate
>for a whole range of workers in the informal economy, from undocumented
>workers to "independence contractors" to sweatshop laborers, whose work is
>not on any clear statistical radars. To argue such workers involve only a
>few percent of the workforce is hardly persuasive, since they are likely to
>involve a disproportionate share of any fluxuation in job creation and
>destruction.
Why should they represent a disproportionate share? Manufacturing work is very cyclical, and that's mostly formal labor. Illegals are heavily employed in agriculture, which isn't included in the payroll survey. They're also employed in restaurants, and food service employment has tracked the cycle pretty precisely.
And I don't get your point here. For the last two months, the BLS has been reporting disappointing job growth, as it did for the two years after the end of the official recession. Are you arguing that they're missing a whole lot of off-the-books employment? The official stats show not only weak employment growth - we're short some 8 million jobs - but declining real wages. Do you disagree with that picture? If so, you might want to write up a memo for the Bush campaign.
Doug