It’s Not a Conspiracy, Just Imprecise Jobs Data

This post on Small Business Trends by Scott Shane is a wonderful reminder that the UK is not alone in wondering why the economic / labour market statistics do not seem to “add up”.

He says:

Almost immediately after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released Friday’s employment report, conservatives claimed a conspiracy to cook the books to help get President Obama re-elected. How does the unemployment rate drop 0.3 percent, they asked, when GDP growth is miniscule and there’s barely enough job growth to absorb a growing population?

Continue reading here

Hazel’s comment:
OK, this is the US of A where they do things differently – but not that differently. Here in the UK there are different counts of different things that someone will then put together for yet a third purpose. The margin for error increases exponentially as you try to make data collected for one purpose fit in with the data collected for another purpose.

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