“The BLS numbers are a joke even in the eyes of the BLS… “
Charles Biderman on why you shouldn’t trust tomorrow’s jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Hat tip to Tyler Durden, who adds:
The simple truth, as Charles notes, is that even the BLS doesn’t believe its own hype (in its footnotes) and while mainstream media and talking heads will quote the unemployment rate or NFP change as if it was transcribed by the hand of God, it is in fact an extremely ill-formed, very narrow survey with such huge statistical noise as to be entirely useless.
What I didn’t realize until watching Biderman today is, we don’t need the BLS’s guesswork. “Realtime data is readily available” of exactly how many people are working and how much they’re making — collected daily by the IRS. “Data that’s not looked at,” Biderman adds.
I suspect looking at that data would require far fewer bureaucrats at the BLS.
These numbers can also be manipulated for political gain – the BLS team surely manipulates them upwards for this administration and downwards for Republican ones. The press preferes them for this reason.
Just like the MSM is being disintermediated thanks to tech, Big Data analytics are making some USG data less relevant as well.
They lie to you about everything else. Why should this be any different?
People would flip out if they started to do things like that, and rightly so. We give the tax man an immense amount of very personal information, and we don’t do it so someone can figure out how many left-handed bagpipe technicians are out of work. Database linking is a big no-no in the public perception, so each agency gets to build their own. If you want to make the case for people to change their minds, do it – there’s reasonable arguments you can use – but don’t just assume malice.
I don’t think anyone’s advocating giving out the keys to the IRS database. I don’t see any privacy concerns with the IRS regularly announcing in aggregate how many individual taxpayer ID numbers they received money from.
I wouldn’t necessarily suggest the BLS is lying. What I would suggest is that their models are constructed for different circumstances. This is NOT a garden-variety Fed-induced recession like we’ve had since WWII, it is an asset bubble deflation which is a different animal. It is very possible the BLS’s map simply does not fit this territory. But either way, once you recognize the data is bogus, it’s time to stop relying on it.
Now we know what life was like in the Soviet Union.