How do they do it, every month?
“REVISED”: 115,000 -—> 154,000
???
If we small businesses “revised” our numbers like that every month, we’d be arrested for fraud. Oh wait, they’re ***The US Govt***, and they can do that legally, can’t they?
Most of these numbers are generated via statistical sampling and model adjustment.
As more and more hard data becomes available through surveys and other sources, they revise the numbers - in some stats, several times. For example, GDP is revised at least twice after being reported for a quarter - and the second revision is over a year out.
Now, the real nut of the issue with they methodology behind these government stats is that they worked pretty well until 2007 going into 2008. None of these statistical series being published by the Fed, BLS, BEA, Census, et al, really have a grip on what happens to the economy during a debt deflation. Most all of our modern economic stats start in the post-WWII era. Most people don’t know how long it took to come up with a national unemployment figure during the Depression - we had no systemic, comprehensive study of unemployment in the 1930’s until about 1960 to 1962. Before that, the BLS didn’t track unemployment - they tracked things like injuries and deaths on the job, but not unemployment.
The fact that these statistical series are so grossly under-reporting various issues (eg, numbers of long-term unemployed, real unemployment) and lack of jobs being taken due to what I like to call “debt immobility” (people are upside-down on their mortgage, and for them to sell their house to take a job in another area *now* would require them selling at a huge loss and then having to go pay the bank the difference) are simply not accounted for in these statistical series and have to be created or inferred from other sources.
This, I believe, is going to cause problems for Obama as we plod onwards into the next downturn. They’re going to be crowing about the 7.something% unemployment rate... and lots of people aren’t going to believe him, because they’ll be looking around their families, neighborhoods, etc and saying “Barry, you’re simply full of crap. I’ve lived through 7% unemployment before... and this ain’t it.”