Warning: That viral unemployment stat from last week doesn't add up

I was scrolling through a city council meeting transcript from Detroit where someone claimed unemployment dropped 3% in a single month... looking at the actual BLS data, the number of people in the labor force also dropped by almost the same amount. Has anyone else caught a local politician using population changes to make employment numbers look better than they really are?

2 comments

2 Comments

grant1551d ago

Makes you wonder how many of those "recovered jobs" are just people who stopped looking and got dropped from the count entirely. Have you cross referenced those Census population estimates against actual tax return filings or Medicare enrollment numbers? Those tend to be slower to update but harder to fudge. Also curious if the state labor department's own internal numbers match what the BLS is reporting for that same period or if there's a gap.

samrodriguez2d ago

Look at the BLS' "birth-death model" adjustments - that's where they really cook the books. Politicians love to cherry pick the seasonally adjusted numbers without mentioning the concurrent labor force contraction. Always pull the raw non-adjusted data from FRED and compare it to the population estimates from the Census Bureau's annual updates. If the labor force participation rate drops alongside the unemployment rate, you're being played.

-1