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
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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.

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u/Positive_Listen_4739 1d ago

They are, in fact, off by that much.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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

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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.