On 02/05/2011 04:09 AM, Horace Heffner wrote: > The innumerate American public can apparently be made to believe > anything by statistical manipulation. Consider this article: > > http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/04/AR2011020406845.html > > > http://tinyurl.com/6blxd3z > > "The jobless rate fell to 9 percent in January from 9.4 percent in > December and 9.8 percent in November." > > "Employers added only 36,000 jobs last month, a quarter of what > forecasters had expected."
Horace, these statistics -- the size of the labor force, aka the "employment rate", and the number of unemployed people, aka the "unemployment rate" -- are typically reported together, but typically also are accompanied by a notice that they are determined by two different surveys, and may, consequently, disagree. IIRC the former is done by a survey of employers, the latter by a survey of households. The occasional glaring discrepancies between the two numbers are not news, at least not to Wall Street Journal readers. I see no compelling reason to disbelieve the official explanation, nor to conclude that somebody must be lying, because the statistics are confusing.
