Nathan Newman wrote: -Independent contractors and the self-employed are not covered by the -establishment survey. (And isn't there overlap between independent -contractors and the self-employed? -<ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/news.release/conemp.txt>) You claimed some -expertise in this area, so I didn't think it was necessary to spell -it out in detail. I also provided a URL that offered some detail on -this:
There should be overlap between ICs and the self-employed, but they do get counted separately in some analyses, as in the GAO survey. Some will treat someone as an IC when they contract overwhelmingly for a single company vs. a self-employed person who works more broadly.
-Also, lots of undoc'd workers are covered by the establishment -survey. Employers are asked how many workers they have, how many -hours they work, and how much they're paid. Whether they're citizens -or legal immigrants isn't in the questionnaire.
That's assuming they are not paid in cash off the books. Yes, many undocumented are in the establishment survey, but the point is that that given we are talking about fluxuations in these numbers of a few percent of the workforce, the fact that there are more than that number in volatile sectors of the economy off the statistical radar is pretty damn significant.
>Not that we shouldn't take trends shown in the numbers seriously, but
>taking them seriously is not the same as taking them as gospel.
-Who takes them as gospel? Really? I spend a good bit of my life -looking at this stuff very closely. I know the data's flaws and -virtues better than people who make a lot more money than I do.
I recognize that you worry about the stats, but a lot of your arguments are based on some reliability in those statistics, so you can "a-hah" the folks who make more than you. If there is a hole of absolute ambiguity in the stats, it means that we have to depend more on qualitative empirical studies-- inherently "softer"-- to talk about the economy, which doesn't play as well to your style. Which is fine, but you do have a methodological/stylistic attachment to claiming some ultimate truth value to the statisticians, even as you may debunk the more careless purveyors of them. But if they aren't "true", you can't debunk. So you do sort of want them to have gospel truth at their heart.
Nathan Newman