Saturday, October 6, 2012

Not worth celebrating yet

Those great employment numbers for September? Don't believe them.

No, there's no dark conspiracy to make President Obama look good. That's another zombie lie out of the feverish and fact-immune rationalization machines that wingnut brains are. It's just that the Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers are too imprecise to justify celebration:

These numbers are always tremendously volatile, but the reasons are statistical, not political. The volatility arises because the numbers are based on a tiny survey with a margin of error of 400,000. Every month there are wild swings that no one takes at face value.
So:
  • The main signal is there in the data, but it's very noisy due to inherent uncertainty in a small survey.
  • There may be an underlying longitudinal change in seasonal behavior that seasonal adjustment models simply haven't yet caught up with.
But that's too complex a reality for tiny wingnut amygdalas. Let's not join them in stupidity on the left, o.k.?

Update: Paul Krugman believes this jobs report is a return to trend:
[T]here is real if modest improvement over the past year. Also, the September numbers looks not like an aberration but like a return to trend from what looks like noise in the data over the previous couple of months.


Clearly far from party time, even so.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Since Obama can't defend his disastrous policies in a debate forum, he just has the labor department cook the books to lower the unemployment rate. It's amazing how over 800,000 jobs were created out of thin air in just one month when the month before it was an anemic increase of 114,000. The public won't buy it Chairman Mao. The rock star Communist lover boy of the Demorat left is going down with a big political thud.

Anonymous said...

"These numbers are always tremendously volatile, but the reasons are statistical, not political."

OMG!!!! That was a whopper!!!!

Lenin would be proud of you scoundrels.

lovable liberal said...

You're not smart enough to realize that I'm arguing against celebrating this month's numbers.

lovable liberal said...

Infants think the world exists to cater to their wishes, and they throw tantrums when it doesn't.

Conservatives too...