You'd be surprised how infrequently someone does a basic sanity check on the voluminous economic numbers published by the government, all of which are derived f

You'd be surprised how infrequently someone does a basic sanity check on the voluminous economic numbers published by the government, all of which are derived from models (probably in a spreadsheet somewhere). Every so often a fresh pair of eyes in the government will notice an obvious flaw in the output of the model, which typically causes a one-time correction to be issued but they don't necessarily retroactively fix previous official numbers. Most of these errors happen with numbers that are sufficiently obscure and specialized that it isn't newsworthy. The underlying methodology for the BLS model is prone to serious bias and brittle. You can see this in the level of disagreement between the BLS numbers and the widely cited ADP numbers. The ADP numbers also have significant fundamental bias, but it is an entirely different kind of bias so both models capture effects that are largely invisible to the other. For Americans in most parts of the US, I think the ADP numbers are a bit closer to ground truth but take either with a large grain of salt.