Friday, February 05, 2010

Government statistics at their finest

So the jobs print came out: we lost an additional 60,000 jobs in January, which meant that unemployment dropped from 10% to 9.7%.

Anyone who thinks the state should be in charge of people's lives should contemplate that stat (released to great fanfare, no less). Instead of mailing tea-bags, if we could just get the bureaucrats to use real data instead of the output of models, we'd be a lot better off (and drink more tea).

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

True, but how does one get good data and ensure it's good?
Data for this recent batch of info was obtained through questioning businesses and households, and so the uncertainty in the measurements makes one wonder how accurate any of these things are.

JimDesu said...

Dude, we lost jobs and the unemployment rate declined. 'nuff said.

Anonymous said...

Yes, but the job loss numbers came from what companies reported and unemployment numbers came from household reports/phone call questions. So it's not a model, it's data sampling is the problem in my opinion.

JimDesu said...

In either case, they're both blessed by the Feds and they don't match -- do not want! :)

Russ said...

The only way this works is if the "discouraged" number went up.

THAT in itself would be considered terrible news.

JimDesu said...

Oooh! That's a bingo!

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