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Really unbelievable. I can't see any reason for a revision this big as anything other than purposeful deception.

spamizbad 2y ago
What would be the point of the deception? To keep rates high? Politically it would be very stupid (dropping a bomb 100 days before a national election).
- anon291 2y ago
  The point of the deception is that no one reports the corrections while the 'X jobs added in May' reports are on the front page
  - tekla 2y ago
    Im having a hard time taking this comment seriously when this article is on the front page Also as far as I know historically, the Govt always publishes revisions publicly. It's just that people dont know about it and dont really care to learn.
    - anon291 2y ago
      I never said the gov't doesn't publish them. I just said papers don't report them prominently. This is the first time I've seen it on the front page, despite similar corrections being made. EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
      - matwood 2y ago
        > I just said papers don't report them prominently. News, especially bad news (and when it comes to financials, news that falls outside expectations), is what gets reported. These revisions down are all over the news today.
  - marinmania 2y ago
    People report this though. It's literally on the front page of the NYTimes right now (with the article this is linked to)
    - anon291 2y ago
      So this is the first time I've seen it on the front page of the NYTimes. The Biden administration has been doing this consistently for years now and normally it's buried deep inside. EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
      - marinmania 2y ago
        It's the third featured story for me now. The top story is one that criticizes Harris for her economic policies. I can't find the web version for the day the original report came out, but in print the initial jobs report was on B1. https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2024/03/09/todays-new-york-times https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2024/03/09/todays-... I'm not even sure if your conspiracy is that the government is cooking the books - or that newspapers are covering for Democrats.
        anon291 2y ago
        It's not a conspiracy. It's just something I've noticed when talking to people. They will happily cite the jobs number that came out in the original report and then look blankly at you when you mention the revision. To me that indicates an imbalance.
  - doomroot13 2y ago
    You're literally commenting on a thread for a NYTimes piece reporting on the corrections.
burnte 2y ago
That doesn't mean it's purposeful deception, though. Flawed methodologies have caused more and larger corrections in many things.
silverquiet 2y ago
If I was going to try and deceive someone, I probably wouldn't publish a revision contradicting my previous numbers. I'd publish something saying the previous numbers were correct.
- jerf 2y ago
  If you want to keep posting numbers that show that some metric is getting better and better, you are mathematically forced to go back and reset the baselines every so often, because otherwise you're going to claim that the United States has a billion and a half jobs before long. Plus, revisions are expected and normal. These stats are hard, and over time more data comes in about the past. What gets suspicious is how consistently the revisions are always in the direction of worse, for whatever "worse" is for the given metric. "Random" errors ought to be distributed more-or-less around zero. It indicates, if not proves, that there are more politics in these numbers than we'd like for supposedly objective metrics. But... if you think about it hard enough, and perhaps have a dash of cynicism, it's what you'd expect. It just requires something that pretty much everyone reading this has personal experience of doing with their own managers. You know which direction to shade the results, to indicate how far the bug is towards being fixed or whatever. Nobody has to tell you. You figure it out pretty quickly. Well, it's not just you and your manager.
  - bandyaboot 2y ago
    The fact that revisions tend to be in one direction should tell us there’s probably some systemic/procedural reason for it, not that it’s political. I’m certainly cynical about politics, but the political explanation here just clearly doesn’t make sense.
    - leereeves 2y ago
      Perhaps it's political, but not partisan. Every administration wants good economic news and more jobs created.
      - 2y ago
ASinclair 2y ago
Purposeful deception by whom and for what purpose?
- anon291 2y ago
  By the current administration to get re-elected? I mean.. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but the motivation seems obvious to me.
  - marinmania 2y ago
    What would be the point of releasing good numbers a year before the election and then forcing yourself to release worse numbers just a couple months before the election?
    - bandyaboot 2y ago
      This observation should be really obvious. The people who think this is nefarious believe they are thinking critically. What they fail to realize is that they are skipping the part where they critically examine their own thought process.
  - itishappy 2y ago
    With a retraction by the Labor Department sent out a few months ahead of the election?
    - mc32 2y ago
      One non-boogeywoman scenario is that they were hoping the numbers would reverse and look good --so they bet things would get better, but they didn't. It's a chance people will take, sometimes.
      - bandyaboot 2y ago
        If they were willing to cook the numbers a year ago, they would certainly be willing to cook the revision numbers right before an election.
bjtitus 2y ago
From Reddit[1]: Believe it or not, I work at the BLS. You can either choose accurate numbers or timely reports, but you can't have both. If you want accuracy, then we need to wait for the QCEW report to be released. This is quarterly, so we wont know what the employment number for January is.. until possibly late April or Early May. Do you care what employment was 5 months ago? Thats why there is an annual benchmarking process, where we look back at the previous 5 quarters of QCEW data and are able to reconcile the differences. The monthly estimation is like playing the "telephone" game. Maybe you played as a child. One person whispers a phrase into the ear of the person next to them and it gets whispered down a big line of people. Once at the end everybody laughs at how different the final phrase is compared to the original phrase. The further away we get from the benchmarked data is the same as being further away from the first time the phrase was whispered - noise WILL enter the data - and it will begin to diverge from the "universe", or the original phrase in the telephone game. There is no conspiracy. There are literally millions of businesses who report their employment data every month. There are easily 100+ eyes on the employment data at the BLS. It is statistically impossible that all 100 BLS employees and the millions of reporters are all in a big "help Biden" conspiracy and there isn't a single iota of evidence or whisperings of a conspiracy. Welcome to the nature of statistics! 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1exrj5u/comment/lj84xlk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1exrj5u/comment/...
- Kon-Peki 2y ago
  Fact-based rebuttals are not useful. People aren't seeking truth and don't care whether what they write is true or not. That's not the point.
legitster 2y ago
I have the counter-reaction - this is incredibly complex data that has to be collected, and expecting it to be perfectly correct immediately every quarter is kind of nuts.
- matwood 2y ago
  Yeah, I thought it was well known that the data is messy. They make educated guesses off the data they have monthly, and then continue to clean it up as they get more data. Such a big revision shows the Fed may already be behind with cuts. Odds were already 100% for a cut in Sept, this new data continues to move the odds up from 25bps to 50bps. As an aside, big government conspiracies always make me laugh because they often come from the same people who say government is incompetent.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- mysterydip 2y ago
  "a downward revision of about 28 percent." I don't expect numbers to be perfect, but with the amount of data access and computing we have, 28 percent off seems like a large amount.
  - Aloisius 2y ago
    The underlying estimates are for total current employed so the error was -0.5%.
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
Easier said than done to get an accurate estimate. If you could do a better job, I'm sure the Federal Reserve would be interested. This is a ~30% miss for the year, which is historically large, but not egregious. https://www.marquetteassociates.com/nonfarm-payroll-employment-revisions/ https://www.marquetteassociates.com/nonfarm-payroll-employme...
mc32 2y ago
Yeah, it was strange to see the reports. The numbers were rosy but all the people I knew looking for jobs had a hard time landing things in contradiction of the numbers. People started doubting themselves. But I think to anyone it was obvious the numbers were wrong. In previous years, even 2022 and 2023, there was a constant stream of recruiters who late last year and all this year had dried up...
- sbelskie 2y ago
  The US economy still added jobs during this period, just fewer than previously calculated.
  - mc32 2y ago
    But what kinds of jobs? Bottom of the barrel jobs, or semi-skilled, skilled and professional? That maters a lot.
    - sbelskie 2y ago
      I’m not making any claims about the quality or types of jobs added, just that they were. You can read the BLS publication for that kind of information.
- Retric 2y ago
  These numbers have very little to do with a small sample of people looking for a job. Something like ~5-10 million people are looking for work at any given time, this is changes that by about 0.07 million per month. What matters to your social circle isn’t overall jobs but how well each sector is doing. LLM’s for example probably have negligible impact on 99% of the economy but that 1% has seen real disruption.
m0llusk 2y ago
These numbers are calculated with a lot of statistical inference. That means, among other things, that the numbers calculated at the start of a downturn end up being way off because the markets change quicker than calculations of trends.
infecto 2y ago
While we need to hold data to the highest standard, these wild thoughts without proof are dangerous. The new norm of suggesting conspiracies without any evidence is a scary future for me.
mattmaroon 2y ago
Yes, the federal government could never just make a mistake.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
nblgbg 2y ago
Revisions happen all the time, sometimes more and sometimes less. https://recruitonomics.com/revisions-to-the-job-numbers-may-trouble-the-fed/ https://recruitonomics.com/revisions-to-the-job-numbers-may-... It’s a headline now for different reasons!
uses 2y ago
> The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process in which monthly estimates, based on surveys, are reconciled with more accurate but less timely records from state unemployment offices. The new figures, once finalized, will be incorporated into official government employment statistics early next year. Or you could just assume everything is a stupid conspiracy
jasonlotito 2y ago
> Really unbelievable. It's actually not. It's only unbelievable if you don't realize this happens literally all the time. FTA: The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process Annual process. It happens around this time every year. > I can't see any reason for a revision this big as anything other than purposeful deception. Your ignorance doesn't make it deception. The argument you are making here is that someone wanted to hide these figures until less than 100 days out from the election? If you want to go down the road of conspiracy theories: Who would benefit from that, I wonder? The reality is this is normal, and the only people raising a fuss about this are people who don't know this happens routinely and this is not abnormal, or people who have an agenda they are pushing through deception.
- mc32 2y ago
  This is the second largest revision ever. But let's say it's ordinary. I'll bet that if a different admin wins the election, the same people saying this is no big deal will make it a big deal, specially if it's around mid-term elections. That's just how it is.
  - jasonlotito 2y ago
    > But let's say it's ordinary. Revisions happen every year. It is ordinary. It's so ordinary, that people were making predictions about these results months ago. > I'll bet... You'd be wrong. Because it has happened in the past, and no one is going on about conspiracy theories about us being lied to because it's dumb. > That's just how it is. No, it's not. Once again, you ignorance doesn't make something true. And doubling down on that ignorance doesn't help you make your case.
underseacables 2y ago
I think politicians desperately want to report only positive news, and with the election coming up, it might make it easy for them to overlook certain ethical parameters. I don't know if this was purposeful deception, perhaps optimistic deception is a better way of putting it.
EasyMark 2y ago
Did you research previous corrections? It’s my understanding that this is not unusual at all. Usually the less “evil” reason is the correct one. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/08/23/heres-why-the-prior-jobs-report-numbers-were-wrong-by-over-half-a-million/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/08/23/heres-why-...

What would be the point of the deception? To keep rates high? Politically it would be very stupid (dropping a bomb 100 days before a national election).

anon291 2y ago
The point of the deception is that no one reports the corrections while the 'X jobs added in May' reports are on the front page
- tekla 2y ago
  Im having a hard time taking this comment seriously when this article is on the front page Also as far as I know historically, the Govt always publishes revisions publicly. It's just that people dont know about it and dont really care to learn.
  - anon291 2y ago
    I never said the gov't doesn't publish them. I just said papers don't report them prominently. This is the first time I've seen it on the front page, despite similar corrections being made. EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
    - matwood 2y ago
      > I just said papers don't report them prominently. News, especially bad news (and when it comes to financials, news that falls outside expectations), is what gets reported. These revisions down are all over the news today.
- marinmania 2y ago
  People report this though. It's literally on the front page of the NYTimes right now (with the article this is linked to)
  - anon291 2y ago
    So this is the first time I've seen it on the front page of the NYTimes. The Biden administration has been doing this consistently for years now and normally it's buried deep inside. EDIT: actually it's nowhere to be found on the front of nytimes.com, which is dedicated to the DNC. You have to scroll to get it. Whereas the positive jobs reports are often the headliner.
    - marinmania 2y ago
      It's the third featured story for me now. The top story is one that criticizes Harris for her economic policies. I can't find the web version for the day the original report came out, but in print the initial jobs report was on B1. https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2024/03/09/todays-new-york-times https://www.nytimes.com/issue/todayspaper/2024/03/09/todays-... I'm not even sure if your conspiracy is that the government is cooking the books - or that newspapers are covering for Democrats.
      - anon291 2y ago
        It's not a conspiracy. It's just something I've noticed when talking to people. They will happily cite the jobs number that came out in the original report and then look blankly at you when you mention the revision. To me that indicates an imbalance.
- doomroot13 2y ago
  You're literally commenting on a thread for a NYTimes piece reporting on the corrections.

burnte 2y ago

That doesn't mean it's purposeful deception, though. Flawed methodologies have caused more and larger corrections in many things.

silverquiet 2y ago

If I was going to try and deceive someone, I probably wouldn't publish a revision contradicting my previous numbers. I'd publish something saying the previous numbers were correct.

jerf 2y ago
If you want to keep posting numbers that show that some metric is getting better and better, you are mathematically forced to go back and reset the baselines every so often, because otherwise you're going to claim that the United States has a billion and a half jobs before long. Plus, revisions are expected and normal. These stats are hard, and over time more data comes in about the past. What gets suspicious is how consistently the revisions are always in the direction of worse, for whatever "worse" is for the given metric. "Random" errors ought to be distributed more-or-less around zero. It indicates, if not proves, that there are more politics in these numbers than we'd like for supposedly objective metrics. But... if you think about it hard enough, and perhaps have a dash of cynicism, it's what you'd expect. It just requires something that pretty much everyone reading this has personal experience of doing with their own managers. You know which direction to shade the results, to indicate how far the bug is towards being fixed or whatever. Nobody has to tell you. You figure it out pretty quickly. Well, it's not just you and your manager.
- bandyaboot 2y ago
  The fact that revisions tend to be in one direction should tell us there’s probably some systemic/procedural reason for it, not that it’s political. I’m certainly cynical about politics, but the political explanation here just clearly doesn’t make sense.
  - leereeves 2y ago
    Perhaps it's political, but not partisan. Every administration wants good economic news and more jobs created.
    - 2y ago

ASinclair 2y ago

Purposeful deception by whom and for what purpose?

anon291 2y ago
By the current administration to get re-elected? I mean.. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but the motivation seems obvious to me.
- marinmania 2y ago
  What would be the point of releasing good numbers a year before the election and then forcing yourself to release worse numbers just a couple months before the election?
  - bandyaboot 2y ago
    This observation should be really obvious. The people who think this is nefarious believe they are thinking critically. What they fail to realize is that they are skipping the part where they critically examine their own thought process.
- itishappy 2y ago
  With a retraction by the Labor Department sent out a few months ahead of the election?
  - mc32 2y ago
    One non-boogeywoman scenario is that they were hoping the numbers would reverse and look good --so they bet things would get better, but they didn't. It's a chance people will take, sometimes.
    - bandyaboot 2y ago
      If they were willing to cook the numbers a year ago, they would certainly be willing to cook the revision numbers right before an election.

bjtitus 2y ago

From Reddit[1]: Believe it or not, I work at the BLS. You can either choose accurate numbers or timely reports, but you can't have both. If you want accuracy, then we need to wait for the QCEW report to be released. This is quarterly, so we wont know what the employment number for January is.. until possibly late April or Early May. Do you care what employment was 5 months ago? Thats why there is an annual benchmarking process, where we look back at the previous 5 quarters of QCEW data and are able to reconcile the differences. The monthly estimation is like playing the "telephone" game. Maybe you played as a child. One person whispers a phrase into the ear of the person next to them and it gets whispered down a big line of people. Once at the end everybody laughs at how different the final phrase is compared to the original phrase. The further away we get from the benchmarked data is the same as being further away from the first time the phrase was whispered - noise WILL enter the data - and it will begin to diverge from the "universe", or the original phrase in the telephone game. There is no conspiracy. There are literally millions of businesses who report their employment data every month. There are easily 100+ eyes on the employment data at the BLS. It is statistically impossible that all 100 BLS employees and the millions of reporters are all in a big "help Biden" conspiracy and there isn't a single iota of evidence or whisperings of a conspiracy. Welcome to the nature of statistics! 1: https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1exrj5u/comment/lj84xlk/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Economics/comments/1exrj5u/comment/...

Kon-Peki 2y ago
Fact-based rebuttals are not useful. People aren't seeking truth and don't care whether what they write is true or not. That's not the point.

legitster 2y ago

I have the counter-reaction - this is incredibly complex data that has to be collected, and expecting it to be perfectly correct immediately every quarter is kind of nuts.

matwood 2y ago
Yeah, I thought it was well known that the data is messy. They make educated guesses off the data they have monthly, and then continue to clean it up as they get more data. Such a big revision shows the Fed may already be behind with cuts. Odds were already 100% for a cut in Sept, this new data continues to move the odds up from 25bps to 50bps. As an aside, big government conspiracies always make me laugh because they often come from the same people who say government is incompetent.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
mysterydip 2y ago
"a downward revision of about 28 percent." I don't expect numbers to be perfect, but with the amount of data access and computing we have, 28 percent off seems like a large amount.
- Aloisius 2y ago
  The underlying estimates are for total current employed so the error was -0.5%.

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

Easier said than done to get an accurate estimate. If you could do a better job, I'm sure the Federal Reserve would be interested. This is a ~30% miss for the year, which is historically large, but not egregious. https://www.marquetteassociates.com/nonfarm-payroll-employment-revisions/ https://www.marquetteassociates.com/nonfarm-payroll-employme...

mc32 2y ago

Yeah, it was strange to see the reports. The numbers were rosy but all the people I knew looking for jobs had a hard time landing things in contradiction of the numbers. People started doubting themselves. But I think to anyone it was obvious the numbers were wrong. In previous years, even 2022 and 2023, there was a constant stream of recruiters who late last year and all this year had dried up...

sbelskie 2y ago
The US economy still added jobs during this period, just fewer than previously calculated.
- mc32 2y ago
  But what kinds of jobs? Bottom of the barrel jobs, or semi-skilled, skilled and professional? That maters a lot.
  - sbelskie 2y ago
    I’m not making any claims about the quality or types of jobs added, just that they were. You can read the BLS publication for that kind of information.
Retric 2y ago
These numbers have very little to do with a small sample of people looking for a job. Something like ~5-10 million people are looking for work at any given time, this is changes that by about 0.07 million per month. What matters to your social circle isn’t overall jobs but how well each sector is doing. LLM’s for example probably have negligible impact on 99% of the economy but that 1% has seen real disruption.

m0llusk 2y ago

These numbers are calculated with a lot of statistical inference. That means, among other things, that the numbers calculated at the start of a downturn end up being way off because the markets change quicker than calculations of trends.

infecto 2y ago

While we need to hold data to the highest standard, these wild thoughts without proof are dangerous. The new norm of suggesting conspiracies without any evidence is a scary future for me.

mattmaroon 2y ago

Yes, the federal government could never just make a mistake.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

nblgbg 2y ago

Revisions happen all the time, sometimes more and sometimes less. https://recruitonomics.com/revisions-to-the-job-numbers-may-trouble-the-fed/ https://recruitonomics.com/revisions-to-the-job-numbers-may-... It’s a headline now for different reasons!

uses 2y ago

> The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process in which monthly estimates, based on surveys, are reconciled with more accurate but less timely records from state unemployment offices. The new figures, once finalized, will be incorporated into official government employment statistics early next year. Or you could just assume everything is a stupid conspiracy

jasonlotito 2y ago

> Really unbelievable. It's actually not. It's only unbelievable if you don't realize this happens literally all the time. FTA: The revisions, which are preliminary, are part of an annual process Annual process. It happens around this time every year. > I can't see any reason for a revision this big as anything other than purposeful deception. Your ignorance doesn't make it deception. The argument you are making here is that someone wanted to hide these figures until less than 100 days out from the election? If you want to go down the road of conspiracy theories: Who would benefit from that, I wonder? The reality is this is normal, and the only people raising a fuss about this are people who don't know this happens routinely and this is not abnormal, or people who have an agenda they are pushing through deception.

mc32 2y ago
This is the second largest revision ever. But let's say it's ordinary. I'll bet that if a different admin wins the election, the same people saying this is no big deal will make it a big deal, specially if it's around mid-term elections. That's just how it is.
- jasonlotito 2y ago
  > But let's say it's ordinary. Revisions happen every year. It is ordinary. It's so ordinary, that people were making predictions about these results months ago. > I'll bet... You'd be wrong. Because it has happened in the past, and no one is going on about conspiracy theories about us being lied to because it's dumb. > That's just how it is. No, it's not. Once again, you ignorance doesn't make something true. And doubling down on that ignorance doesn't help you make your case.

underseacables 2y ago

I think politicians desperately want to report only positive news, and with the election coming up, it might make it easy for them to overlook certain ethical parameters. I don't know if this was purposeful deception, perhaps optimistic deception is a better way of putting it.

EasyMark 2y ago

Did you research previous corrections? It’s my understanding that this is not unusual at all. Usually the less “evil” reason is the correct one. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/08/23/heres-why-the-prior-jobs-report-numbers-were-wrong-by-over-half-a-million/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackkelly/2019/08/23/heres-why-...