Mistakes in the Jobs Report

The monthly jobs report has unfortunately become politicized. Prominent figures on both sides have accused the other of cooking the data. This is baseless conspiracy thinking.

Interestingly enough, the BLS admitted that the data in Friday’s report was incorrect. They put out the wrong data with an explanation. The BLS will revise the figures next month. They don’t do it immediately in order to avoid the appearance of political pressure.

When the U.S. government’s official jobs report for May came out on Friday, it included a note at the bottom saying there had been a major “error” indicating that the unemployment rate likely should be higher than the widely reported 13.3 percent rate.

The special note said that if this “misclassification error” had not occurred, the “overall unemployment rate would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported,” meaning the unemployment rate would be about 16.3 percent for May. But that would still be an improvement from an unemployment rate of about 19.7 percent for April, applying the same standards.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the agency that puts out the monthly jobs reports, said it was working to fix the problem.

Instead of some conspiracy, I think it’s simply hard to get accurate data during such extreme events.

Posted by on June 8th, 2020 at 10:50 am


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