If the Trump admin can 'misclassify' jobless claims by 3%...

[ck4829]

Then how much do you think it can 'misclassify' your fellow Americans when it wants to declare them as "antifa terrorists"?

[Moostache]

1. Still trust the "growth numbers"?

How about the real number of deaths he has caused via Coronavirus pandemic?
It is all fiction and bullshit at this point, every fucking syllable...

[pandr32]

2. +1

[Dirty Socialist]

3. + another 1

[forgotmylogin]

4. Can we 'misclassify' him as POTUS?

[PaxtonSahara]

5. I get your point but

FYI. The numbers are processed by the BLS, mainly career professionals. The instrument used to collect the data could not be adjusted to include a choice for COVID-19 so the choice "Other reason not working" had to be used. When they processed the data there was an error as "Other" is not usually used in a specific way like this. As soon as it was caught the same day it was corrected. I head a data collection team and it was drilled into all of use to enter COVID related data correctly. Wish the mistake hadn't been made but, please understand, we are all under stress trying to get it right and know we are not perfect. It may not seem like it but data collection for labor statistics has an especially tight window and the deadlines are fierce even under normal times. Just sayin'.

[progree]

6. Bull. The same problem happened in March and April too. And no numbers were corrected

And to be clear: the numbers in the report are wrong. They were not corrected. The only "correction" is a long-winded note to point out that the numbers are mistaken, at least the employment and unemployment numbers (the error was that some unemployed were miscategorized as employed).

3 months in a row. 3 months in a row.

Details #12 in this thread
https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=13560715

As soon as it was caught the same day it was corrected.

False. An error notice was put in the report. But not a single number was corrected. Not one. The reader was left to do the math: 13.3% + "about 3 percentage points" = "about 16.3%". (And the reader was also left to seasonally adjust the "about 3 percentage points" too. Nice.)

They explicitely said the error was not corrected:
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

| If the workers who were recorded as employed but absent from work due to "other |
| reasons" (over and above the number absent for other reasons in a typical May) had |
| been classified as unemployed on temporary layoff, the overall unemployment rate |
| would have been about 3 percentage points higher than reported (on a not seasonally |
| adjusted basis). However, according to usual practice, the data from the household |
| survey are accepted as recorded. To maintain data integrity, no ad hoc actions are |
| taken to reclassify survey responses.

And that's for just the national U-3 unemployment rate. What about black unemployment? white? male? female? the different age groups? U-4, U-5, U-6? And their demographic subgroups? How about states and other geographic entities?

And what about the unemployed count in thousands, both overall (20,985,000) and for the demographic subgroups? Any of those corrected? Nope, I didn't think so.

And the Employed number was not corrected. If 4.7 million were misclassified as employed, that means that the reported 3.8 M gain in Employed is really a 0.9 million LOSS.

http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS12000000

Needless to say, all the demographic subgroups of Employed are wrong too.

And are you telling us that it all came to light in a single day? Particularly considering the same errors occurred in March and April?

And hell, after all this time, the March and April unemployment rates haven't been corrected. E.g. April is still reported as 14.7% in the data series, when the correct number is 14.7% + "almost 5 percentage points" = almost 19.7%.

See here for the unemployment rate: https://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS14000000

[progree]

7. Actually, the error was not in the jobless CLAIMS, but rather in the unemployment rate

and number of unemployed in the monthly jobs report, that comes from the Household Survey of 60,000 households. The unemployment rate in the monthly jobs report (like the one that came out Friday) is NOT a count of the number of unemployment insurance claims, nor of people collecting benefits, nor any other information from state unemployment offices.

The unemployment insurance claims data is completely separate and different than the Household Survey that produces the unemployment rate.

That said, they screwed up royally 3 months in a row in producing the unemployment rates (and number of unemployed) in the March, April, and May jobs reports:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=13560715

And as you can see in my post #6 just above, this affects a lot of subgroup numbers too.