If I was going to try and deceive someone, I probably wouldn't publish a revision contradicting my previous numbers. I'd publish something saying the previous numbers were correct.
If you want to keep posting numbers that show that some metric is getting better and better, you are mathematically forced to go back and reset the baselines every so often, because otherwise you're going to claim that the United States has a billion and a half jobs before long.
Plus, revisions are expected and normal. These stats are hard, and over time more data comes in about the past. What gets suspicious is how consistently the revisions are always in the direction of worse, for whatever "worse" is for the given metric. "Random" errors ought to be distributed more-or-less around zero. It indicates, if not proves, that there are more politics in these numbers than we'd like for supposedly objective metrics.
But... if you think about it hard enough, and perhaps have a dash of cynicism, it's what you'd expect. It just requires something that pretty much everyone reading this has personal experience of doing with their own managers. You know which direction to shade the results, to indicate how far the bug is towards being fixed or whatever. Nobody has to tell you. You figure it out pretty quickly.
The fact that revisions tend to be in one direction should tell us there’s probably some systemic/procedural reason for it, not that it’s political. I’m certainly cynical about politics, but the political explanation here just clearly doesn’t make sense.
What's jerf is saying is that the systems and procedures end up being selected (to some extent maybe unconsciously) based on political considerations. This isn't a radical view. Economists and many other kinds of academics have a long history of adapting ideas, metrics and systems to please political masters. Or more accurately, to appear useful to political masters.
For example the famous 2% inflation goal is regularly presented as an apolitical target based on firm economic theory. In reality it was invented out of whole cloth for purely political reasons:
What if, they asked, they just told everyone the rate should be much lower - say roughly 2% - and then aim for that?
"It was a bit of a shock to everyone, I think," said Roger Douglas, the Labour Party finance minister at the time who worked with the Treasury and Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) to pioneer the policy. "I just announced it was gonna be 2%, and it sort of stuck."
I think I understand what you're saying. Rather than "The Biden admin cooked the initial numbers to make themselves look good", it's more "The process for generating the initial numbers has been influenced by politics over the years to favor initially higher numbers." That does make sense and is certainly a possible and perhaps partial explanation for what's going on.
Yes and it's not specific to the US or any specific administration. It's also not in this case a long term thing, the problem has appeared quite recently.
Earlier this year a gap opened up between what Americans were reporting in economic confidence surveys and the official stats. Historically they've tracked very tightly, almost in lockstep, so that gives some confidence in the official data. Then suddenly Biden was touting an amazing economy and the job numbers departed from what people were reporting as their on-the-ground impression. The cause is probably double counting due to remote work, zombie job ads and so on: lots of jobs that are being advertised but are duplicates or don't really exist, caused by a combination of the pandemic and new job board websites. But if you're on Team Biden are you going to prioritize figuring out why the gap between your data and public sentiment has appeared? Maybe making yourself look bad in the process? Or will you decide that there are more important priorities elsewhere? It's probably the latter and won't even feel political, just like it's the right thing to do. Of course because these are unarticulated decisions not policies, there's always a risk of some other process or person coming in and rearranging priorities for you, which maybe is what happened here.
For another example look at the UK. Their population statistics are a mess and have been for many years. At one point the ONS even reclassified them as experimental. If you're a strongly pro-mass migration politician or cabinet, are you going to be down at the ONS giving them hell about this every day? Probably not. It's not that the numbers are cooked, but more that problems arise that nobody cares to fix because the fix would create new problems for them.
There's a reason I grounded my cynicism is something that I defy anyone who has been working in a commercial environment for more than, say, a year, to say they haven't done. You've shaded the stats too. But people get this block where they think that there's some sort of boundary somewhere where people pass it and stop doing it. There isn't one. We're All Just Folk. That includes government economic statistics collectors as much as it includes your HOA as much as it includes you personally, dear reader. We're All Just Folk. There's no educational attainment, no level of responsibility, no certification, no amount of training that un-humans the humans. We're All Just Folk.
But then you can get caught for lying or at least being incompetent, instead of just playing it off as "statistics is hard :(" If the initial claims get more press than the revisions, then it pays off. I'm really curious how often the revised figures are worse, rather than better. I have a feeling the revised figures are always worse for whatever administration is in power.
Run with bogus numbers, let the narrative set in, release revised numbers, and they hurt you for a few days but are quickly forgotten. Especially if they are released during the middle of your convention where every major outlet is absorbed with releasing puff pieces about how the VP pick is "America's dad".
Less cynical is they were crossing their fingers things would go back up. Kind of like a day trader in the red, keep on betting because eventually things will go up --maybe just not in time... this time.
Basically. Put out 10 headlines of job growth to set expectations -> market behaviour. Last part important because you can keep economy humming for some time via perception management and collective delusion. Which affects voter sentiment during election season. Have media that favours you, which MSM does dems, not emphasis revisions in news cycle. It's not about fearing getting caugh because BLS is "transparent", transparency matters much less when you have influence/control over setting news agenda.
That said, were consistent downward revisions last year historically anomolous? I've seen conspiracize so, charts et all. If true, then there's charitably some new artefact in system or uncharitably deception.
