“The numbers are real — I just think we got blindsided because we got too focused on claims,” said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics. He noted that data from private sources, such as air travel and restaurant bookings, began to improve in mid-April, which is consistent with the modest rebound shown in the jobs report.
How do we know the numbers aren’t rigged?
This isn’t the first time that prominent people have questioned the jobs numbers. In 2012, Jack Welch, the former General Electric chief, implied that “Chicago guys” in the Obama administration had rigged a jobs report to help the president win re-election. As a presidential candidate in 2016, Donald Trump called the unemployment rate, then at 5 percent, “one of the biggest hoaxes in American modern politics.”
But as my colleague Patricia Cohen wrote at the time, there are many protections in place to ensure that the jobs numbers and other economic indicators are kept free of politics. And Ms. Groshen and other economists said they had seen no evidence that has changed under Mr. Trump.
“I have seen no red flags, anything to suggest that the numbers are rigged,” Ms. Groshen said.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics is headed by a political appointee, currently William W. Beach, who previously served as a Republican Senate staff member and an economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation. But the rest of the bureau is staffed by career employees, many predating the Trump administration.
Ms. Groshen and other economists say those employees, whom she called “the most dedicated data nerds on the face of the earth,” would raise alarms if they saw signs of political interference. And there is virtually no way the numbers could be changed without their noticing, she said.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/business/economy/jobs-report-data.html
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