I think that there are two things at work here. 1. Who is the designed consumer of this data. In the US the CEW (census of employment and wage) is a data set

I think that there are two things at work here. 1. Who is the designed consumer of this data. In the US the CEW (census of employment and wage) is a data set that is primarily aimed at economists or modelers. The startling thing is how these data-sets became mainstream. I work in economics and for years no one was particularly conscious of when these figures are released(non quantitative people i mean) but now I am often surprised how many regular people know that the first Friday of the month is unemployment data day. The danger here is that modelers planning to work with the data are well aware of the signal to noise ratio and take it into account with everything they do. Unemployment data in the US at a granular level is also heavily redacted for a variety of reasons which makes this problem even worse. 2. The second issue that I would have loved to have seen this article elaborate on is what are our core metrics as a society. This is something that we still haven't nailed yet. I have friends who work at the government institutions the produce this data and they can tell you that most of this work is still done with a very mid 20th century mindset. On the other hand I know people who work with large business data-sets such as supply chain data from Amazon Walmart and others. This data is far more robust and could be used to give a much truer picture of how the economy is doing but it is currently locked up under the veil of corporate secrecy. if gov't statistical agencies could figure out how to work with this data we could do significantly better.