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bjtitus | 1 year ago
Believe it or not, I work at the BLS.
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.
Welcome to the nature of statistics!
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1exrj5u/comment/...
Kon-Peki|1 year ago