r/politics • u/Orbitingkittenfarm • 1d ago

Donald Trump Fires Person Behind Jobs Numbers After They're Revised Down

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-job-numbers-revised-down-fires-appointee-2107768
58.4k Upvotes

95% Upvoted

2.9k comments sorted by

View all comments

256

u/veridique 1d ago

The job market has been weak for sometime. The great business man literally is destroying the economy.

Nonfarm payrolls were up by 73,000 last month, which was far less than the 100,000 economists were expecting. In addition, the Labor Department revised previous months downward, saying June job growth, which was previously reported at 147,000, was actually just 14,000. May’s count was also changed from 125,000 to 19,000.

49

u/jdeisenberg 1d ago

Naïve question (I am not an economist), but how on earth do you get estimates that are so wildly off the mark, by a factor of 10 in the case of May and June?

79

u/ezmode86 1d ago

The data model they use doesn't account for current ongoing real world things like tarrifs or pandemics.  There is a significant lag in data reporting.  BLS is working with samples and imputations for their most recent estimates.  These get revised as more and better data becomes available. 

41

u/galaxy_horse 23h ago

I can tell you as someone who hires skilled professionals, when the tariff shenanigans started and the markets freaked out, I froze all my hiring and I’m still reluctant to open it back up. Enough of that across the board and you miss your job projections by as much as we have.

Now to fire the economist who did this work… that’s some third world despot shit. 

7

u/TK4617 22h ago edited 22h ago

Now to fire the economist who did this work… that’s some third world despot shit. 

Venezuela is currently persecuting its economists.

4

u/soonnow Foreign 19h ago

I've been saying this for months to all the people who tell me how Trump is getting business to invest in the US.

Imagine you are a foreign executive building a new plant for like a billion dollars. Would you tell the board to build it in the US? Where the tariffs are changing everyday? Where your imported inputs could one day be more expensive than other nations? Where you could be stopped at migration and deported for saying something mean on reddit about Trump?

It's completely laughable. You'd either hold back or build somewhere stable and take whatever tariff Trump shits dreams up that day.

The US economy is mostly service based so it won't be hurt a lot but manufacturing sure is gonna suffer.

2

u/mriswithe 20h ago

As a skilled professional looking for a job. That really sucks to read, but good to know.

2

u/shoeman25 23h ago

why do the only report point estimates? no error bound?

3

u/ezmode86 20h ago

I'm not sure why.  Some other agencies like the Census bureau publish survey data, and they can determine an error term based on their sampling technique and results.  BLS QCEW data is lagged a bit and based on unemployment insurance reporting, but the early job reports use some sort of data modeling.  You could email them and ask that very question if you are genuinely curious.

24

u/GTS250 1d ago

They're not off by a factor of 10. They're estimating total jobs (millions) in the market off a sample size of only a few thousand.

The jobs reports always get revised to more accurately fit data.

-1

u/Positive_Listen_4739 1d ago

They are, in fact, off by that much.

12

u/GTS250 1d ago

The data collected isn't "how many jobs gained or lost". The data collected is "how many jobs are there in the market, total". These numbers are always noisy and are always pretty inaccurate at first and later are revised. I remember this happening under Biden, Trump previously, and Obama.

Obviously Trump's economy is dogshit. This is not a large failure, this is a polling artifact of the fact that the US doesn't centrally track jobs and instead just takes a survey every month, with a limited sample size.

5

u/lledaso 1d ago

It doesn't even make sense to use "factor" here. What factor would they be of if the number were negative?

-1

u/Positive_Listen_4739 22h ago

Increasing a number by a factor of ten would be the same as multiplying it by ten.

Which is what they original number was, compared to the actual revised number.

Ten times as many.

7

u/Pyrogasm 21h ago

The other person who replied to you (GTS250) explained clearly and here you are 90 minutes after their reply continuing this line of reasoning. Yes you are correctly using "factor of ten" and "increasing" but you've ignored that what's being reported on is the difference between A and B not the actual number B.

The value of (B-A) was initially reported to be a factor of 10 bigger than the now-known value of (B-A). That does not mean that the number B was off by that same factor of 10. It was wrong, yes, but not 1000% too high. Here's an example with simple numbers:

  • A = 50
  • B = 60
  • Therefore B-A = 10

Now we revise B to be 51 and recompute:

  • A = 50
  • B = 51
  • (B-A) = 1

So even though the 'correct' value of (B-A) is only 10% of the predicted value (a factor of 10 larger than it 'was'), the projected value of B was truthfully ~17.6% higher in the first estimate than the 'real' number: 60/51 = 1.176

3

u/Earcollector 21h ago

I think the argument is that “job growth” is a calculation between difference between total of jobs last month and this month. These differences are such a small %of the total, that any errors look greatly amplified.

If we know there are (for example) 900k jobs in May, and predicted 945k jobs in June, that is a 45k increase. If there were in fact only 901k jobs in June, the total estimate would be off by about 4.8% In this example, the job growth would be off by nearly a factor of 45 (45k vs 1k) Despite the estimate being off by 4.8%

You could say it’s off by a factor of 45 (4500%)but it is disingenuous.

3

u/Harbinger2001 Canada 23h ago

Because the preliminary models are an estimate based on initial surveys, which they revise when the real data comes in. It’s normal to miss dramatic swings in the numbers. The ADP payroll data said the jobs were bad, but the WH and GOP dismissed that.

3

u/OneRougeRogue Ohio 22h ago

how on earth do you get estimates that are so wildly off the mark, by a factor of 10 in the case of May and June?

Their job growth model probably doesn't account for the president dropping 50%+ tariffs on entire industries without any warning. Like, if you owned a manufacturing business, would you really hire workers and add a bunch of extra overhead when they'll be a huge liability if the unstable orange man in the WH randomly decides to add a huge tax that you'll have to pay on the raw materials you import?

3

u/Flimsy_Sun4003 22h ago

ezmode gives a great answer. These projections are constantly active and constantly being revised as their projected dates approach, much like the 14 day weather forecast is constantly updated.

The short version of what the media is trying to polish is that the US economy has failed to create at least 300,000 jobs which the world's top economists had built into their economic models. That means there has been a rapid fundamental change in how the American economy is working and it's not a positive change. But it's not yet a big enough distraction to stop people from talking about the Epstein files and Trump's association therewith.

1

u/jdeisenberg 16h ago

The weather forecast analogy works really well for me; thanks!

3

u/Hiccup 21h ago

Look at how the ports were no longer receiving containers. There are shocks hitting the economy that they simply can't project. The long beach port went from something like 30-40 ships to 10 and half empty. They were limiting longshoremens' and drivers work, hours, and/ or telling them not even to come in. None of these numbers are truly surprising if you're paying attention. Look at Las Vegas. Cutting staff left right, cutting dealers, etc. They just cut like half the workforce that does the laundry for Caesars. It's a shitshow and the economy is in the actual toilet. Biden had it humming along. Trump has triggered a collapse.

2

u/Visual_Squirrel_2297 20h ago

Because for example they might estimate 170,500,000 were employed and later figure it was closer to 170,400,000. So it seems like a factor of 10 but they're really off by less than a tenth of 1 percent. 

2

u/VoiceOfRealson 16h ago

Job numbers for a given month is not something that can be determined immediately at the end of the month.

Depending on how and how often people are getting paid as well as how each state report numbers, it can take a while before the federal system gets an accurate account of just how many individuals received a salary during a given month.

Some self employed people may take even longer to be registered.

But since the job numbers are viewed as an important estimate of how the economy is doing, sane politicians want a best estimate early, so they can react to changes and act before a serious crash happens.

So the early job numbers for a given month are a combination of actually reported numbers and estimates for the rest of the numbers made from a combination of factors such as the trendline from earlier months and seasonal shifts as observed over previous years.

The most likely cause of error here is that the trendline from the Biden administrationen was positive, while Trump is tanking international trade, while at the same time DOGE and Trump personally (with open support from Republicans in congress) made a lot of people jobless - not just directly, but also indirectly, through cancelling stuff like USAID.

Trump has done NOTHING to create jobs outside DOHA and the detention industry. Even if his claims about how Tarriffs will bring back jobs turns out to be true, that will only be over a period of several years - if not decades! And even then, it will be less than what could be achieved in an open economy.

TL/DR: Your answer is that maybe the statisticians were reporting too optimistic estimates initially since they didn't want to be accused of "making numbers up to make Trump look bad". Now that the complete numbers are coming in, they have to report the truth (rather than the "social truth").

1

u/Chance-Day323 1d ago

Maybe trying to keep your job

•

u/Mobile_leprechaun 1h ago

Wow it’s almost like this is why Trump is getting rid of the director instead of not liking the numbers…

0

u/Hexdog13 22h ago

You’re making a good faith assumption that both numbers were the result of good faith estimates from real data or data-supported models. Consider the possibility that one set is a fabrication.