More About Bad Data

[tjscott0]

I wanted a few weeks ago about inaccurate poverty benchmark.

The Measuring Stick is OUTDATED

This week, while trying to understand why the American middle class feels poorer each year despite healthy GDP growth and low unemployment, I came across a sentence buried in a research paper: “The U.S. poverty line is calculated as three times the cost of a minimum food diet in 1963, adjusted for inflation.” The formula was developed by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration. In 1963, she observed that families spent roughly one-third of their income on grocerie…

Now Mish points outs inaccurate employment Dara.

Understanding the Enormous BLS Job Report Errors, What Really Happened?

The BLS admits that it undercounted employment by 2 million, spread out over a number of years. Instead of parsing that out in the correct months, the BLS plowed the entire adjustment into January of 2025.

This makes all historical comparisons of numbers flawed.

However, there is yet another series in which the BLS parses that 2 million undercount into the correct months.

This is another data series I expect few people are aware of. Again, those are all BLS numbers.

For discussion, please see Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey

Is this anyway to run a country?

[pauleckler]

Figures don’t lie but liars figure. Everyone else debates the accuracy of the data and what it means if anything.