The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced employment figures for April 2013: 165,000 new jobs. No one knows exactly what that means, but one thing is certain: This number will certainly change. Does that indicate government ineptitude or political manipulation? No.
Like many kinds of research, determining macroeconomic facts like the employment rate is a process of successive approximation. Since the United States doesn’t have a centralized economy, collecting the data takes a while, so there are statistical corrections to past reports over time, as additional information becomes available.
Republicans plan to fix this employment research lag problem the way they fixed the gun death research problem: Forbid collection of statistics about it.
So, at this point in time, BLS researchers believe this is the rate of job growth, which puts the official employment rate at 7.5%, lowest in 5 years. That’s the way it looks now, anyway. Stay tuned.
More:
“The April jobs report, in 8 charts,” Dylan Matthews, Washington Post blog
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Tags: BLS, Bureau of Labor Statistics, economics, economy, employment, employment rate, joblessness, jobs, macroeconomics, unemployment, unemployment rate
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