Oh my god do not trigger me about the news reporting “points” for the DOW or the S&P, I have seriously considered calling news stations about this.

Or not providing inflation adjusted values when referring to historical financial reference points.

I have to go find a happy place now

Something the best data scientist I ever worked with was adamant about... there is almost never an inherent "speed bump" at 0. If error bounds expand on both sides of 0, we have no idea if the true sign is positive or negative. There is no "directional" read in that case. There are some areas where 0 has a special meaning, but that's rare and the cause of that needs to be understood before assuming that's the case. Everywhere else, 0 is just another point on the number line.

> the error bars would be so large as to make drawing conclusions from these numbers seem pointless

That is often the case, and being truly data based requires acknowledging that. We can then act based on other data, or admit that we're falling back to intuition and abandoning data based decision making for now.

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hah. it's true. no interest in uncertainty except when forced.

Not in their primary news release. A footnote says it is "generally conducted at the 90% interval", but the individual numbers do not have their actual computed error bars.

Yes, they do publish them, but it is disappointing their primary releases do not have them.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/empsit.pdf

NBC wouldn't know how to navigate bls.gov if you put a gun to their head. And it's all downhill from there

Yes! I am aware of this and they are really great. Problem is nobody will ever read that, but they WILL watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never even point out that there are errorbars/uncertainty. Then I hear things like outrage when BLS revises numbers up or down (facepalm).

> The numbers are as good as they can get

That doesn't mean they don't warrant error bars.

Error bars aren't there to show that you didn't do a good job collecting the data, they're there to show your level of uncertainty.

That's true for the establishment survey, but the population survey, where they contact individuals, is what is actually used to calculate these numbers.

It is literally calling/writing 60,000 people and asking "are you employed? did you look for a job? Etc."

"How the government calculates unemployment" [0]

| Does anyone in this household have a business or a farm? | Last week, did you do any work for (either) pay (or profit)? | If the answer to question 1 is "yes" and the answer to question 2 is "no," the next question is: | Last week, did you do any unpaid work in the family business or farm? | For those who reply "no" to both questions 2 and 3, the next key questions used to determine employment status are: | Last week, (in addition to the business) did you have a job, either full or part time? Include any job from which you were temporarily absent. | Last week, were you on layoff from a job? | What was the main reason you were absent from work last week? | For those who respond "yes" to question 5 about being on layoff, the following questions are asked:

[0] https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_htgm.htm

What makes you think it's small businesses? I would assume most businesses doing any reporting at all are using a payroll system. Mine handles the reporting automatically. The kinds of payroll systems used by small businesses can be set up in a day. If anything, small businesses that make even a small effort to stay on top of things have an easier time than big ones with complicated systems and processes.

I think you say “as good as they can get with [the] hard manual work that goes into compiling them” as a way to respect the challenge of the BLS and say they’re doing the best with their resources, but it’s worth pointing out they could be better with more resources.

Oh I’m well aware the BLS knows what they’re doing and publish error bars, they are great. The problem is news articles, no one ever reads BLS reports but they do watch Fox News, CNBC, etc. and those outlets never ever get into uncertainty.

2.30 × 10⁴ or bust

Exactly. I'm somewhat surprised someone's give-a-damn wasn't broken enough to do a cursory filter. Not like it isn't plainly obvious in other statistics, however.