Jack Salmon and Revana Sharfuddin dug into employment data in their post on “The September Jobs Report That Never Was.” They showed that while headline job growth appeared strong, the underlying data tell a more complicated story: declining full-time employment, weakening wage growth, and a labor market increasingly held up by part-time and government jobs.
Their takeaway is both simple and urgent: Without robust private-sector growth, no amount of statistical gloss can sustain the story of a healthy economy.
But beyond that, Jack and Revana also seized the chance created by the government shutdown, which delayed the release of the September jobs report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Jack and Revana took the opportunity to examine how labor statistics are produced and to identify ways measurement could be improved. Any statistic can be co-opted by political actors, and labor statistics often are. As Jack and Revana put it, “The real problem isn’t bias; it’s something deeper about how we measure employment in the first place and why our measurement system keeps missing by such large margins.”
Large revisions, such as the ones the BLS released in September showing the economy added hundreds of thousands of fewer jobs than initially estimated, can undermine trust, but the answer isn’t throwing out the entirety of the current approach. We should make incremental, but important, improvements. Things like quarterly benchmarking, refined imputations, and great transparency could substantially improve accuracy.
Ben Brophy Vice President, Strategic Engagement
Mercatus Center at George Mason University
Topics & Issues
Revana Sharfuddin is cited in Anthropic’s blog for her argument that the US tax code creates a bias favoring physical capital investment over human capital investment.
Tariffs are a fiscal illusion. It might seem as if they tax foreigners, but they hit Americans harder, according to Jack Salmon.
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