| ▲ | shmerl 4 days ago |
| > The president wants his own people there so that, when we see the numbers, they’re more transparent and more reliable He wants people there to be his version of Minitrue, providing the numbers he wants to see, not the real ones: Reporting unworkers doubleplusun-good, rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling. |
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| ▲ | topspin 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
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| ▲ | scarface_74 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | The President just fired the person in charge of reporting jobs numbers because he didn’t like the report. Logically what do you think is about to happen? | |
| ▲ | trealira 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, firing the labor statistics head because Trump say she's been faking the numbers to make him look bad actually makes it seem both obviously politically motivated and casts whatever comes after into doubt. Now their credibility is degraded. That's different from just saying the numbers are obviously being faked under Biden or whatever with no real evidence because you just feel like the economy is bad and assume corruption. Now there actually does seem to be corruption! | |
| ▲ | esseph 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | It IS THE GOVERNMENT | |
| ▲ | shmerl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Yeah, tin party soldier never questions anything. | | | |
| ▲ | hyperadvanced 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | On this topic- last year it was somewhat common for R politicians to criticize the D regime for the “report high, revise low” strategy - if anything, I guess, this firing has been telegraphed. Anyway, those people were also called conspiracy theorists and politically motivated. There’s clearly a conflict of interest between the facts and what is politically expedient on all sides of the political system in the USA. I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. I doubt Trump has that goal in mind necessarily, laudable as it might be. | | |
| ▲ | tbrownaw 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I personally would prefer that the jobs numbers apparatus was extremely conservative in the sense that it didn’t overstate the strength of the USA economy. This sounds like a call for it to be biased low? I'd prefer zero net bias - overstate and understate equally often - and as little error as possible. (Also, I'd like a pet unicorn for the munchkin.) The problem seems to be around the preliminary numbers and how widely they get reported. Maybe this is a case where excessive transparency and reporting partial data that's known to be inaccurate is negatively useful? Or maybe there could be some way to get people to accept that it's known to be wrong, and only useful if you have the chops to account for that wrongness in whatever you're using it for? But humans in general seem to mostly be allergic to not knowing things, so... Maybe the wrongness is predictable enough to model and account for, but publishing "expected correction" numbers along with the preliminary numbers would be extremely un-conservative in that doing that is speaking with your own voice rather than just collecting and reporting data. | | |
| ▲ | hyperadvanced 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Biased low if it must be - a more down-home way of phrasing that is “don’t count your chickens before they hatch,” which, in any case seems like better labor-statistical common sense than the other way around. |
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| ▲ | koolba 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Alternatively, he wants someone at the top who will create an organization that does not have to repeatedly restate massively incorrect numbers. |
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| ▲ | keeda 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Such an organization cannot exist. These agencies are always balancing two opposing forces, timeliness and accuracy. Data collection is inherently delayed (e.g. a lot of it is from surveys that businesses complete at their own speed, or from reports that each state/agency submits on their own timeline.) So collection for a given quarter typically completes long after the quarter is over, and then it takes some time to crunch those numbers. So if you want early data it will inherently be of limited accuracy because that involves a lot of extrapolation with whatever incomplete data has been collected by that time. If you want accurate data you will have to wait for it because that data takes longer to be collected. You do want both because you need to make timely decisions, since most times the early numbers don't get revised by much, but you also want to course-correct when later, better data gives a different signal. Agencies like the BLS publish their methodologies in great detail. Big revisions have always been happening, only they are getting more attention these days because of the heavy politicization. | | |
| ▲ | mensetmanusman 4 days ago | parent [-] | | They shouldn’t announce until it’s accurate then? | | |
| ▲ | keeda 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | That's where the timeliness versus accuracy trade-off comes in. There is significant value in having an early signal to act on, especially as long as there is awareness of its limitations. And as I mentioned, this data does come with very clearly documented caveats and methodologies so that users can make informed decisions. | |
| ▲ | rrrrrrrrrrrryan 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Normally they're accurate enough, and the revisions/refinements are small. The initial estimates haven't been accurate recently, because many workers have been completely dropping out of the economy because they're afraid of immigration raids. Information about these workers is just harder to gather and takes longer to verify. | | |
| ▲ | gg82 3 days ago | parent [-] | | Actually the major complaint was from last year when Biden was president (I'm not sure about this year). Every month, prior months were adjusted downward, often 100,000's thousands and wiping out the previous months positive figure. |
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| ▲ | 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | [deleted] | |
| ▲ | PieTime 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Unless they are accurate most of the time, I would agree with this. |
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| ▲ | altcognito 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How massively incorrect are the numbers in comparison to previous years? Was it anything unusual? Here, take a look for yourself:
https://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#2024 If this is an understood part of the process, why is it such a problem now? Name some organizations that have "fire employees until we get success". Does that create a culture that prizes success, or just encourage employees to hide failure? | |
| ▲ | magic_man 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | The numbers get better as they get more data. | | |
| ▲ | mh- 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Why not wait to release them until enough data has come in that it's settled? Serious question, what's the downside? | | |
| ▲ | altcognito 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Because the market values the early results and has an adult understanding of what the numbers mean. | |
| ▲ | csb6 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Because the law requires them to release reports on certain dates, so they do so and then make corrections as more data comes in. | | | |
| ▲ | kergonath 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | It’s never settled as the data is never perfectly accurate or exhaustive. We just have to do with the caveats and understand that perfection does not exist, even if you have more data than you can handle. That’s what error bars, uncertainty analysis, and confidence intervals are for. |
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| ▲ | shmerl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Or rather not mention them at all. He'd rather not bring attention to the topic to begin with. | | | |
| ▲ | EndsOfnversion 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I think you understand how labor statistics work about as well as Trump. |
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