Yesterday, Dan Froomkin said:
CJR Campaign Desk: Archives: I'd like to see a lot less stenography and lot more research. There's context here, people.... Don't just do he said/she said...
Today I look at the New York Times business section, and find:
The New York Times: The Data: A Job Picture Painted With Different Brushes: July was a poor month for job creation in the United States.
July was an excellent month for job creation in the United States.
That tale of two employment reports is true, and it continues a trend that has persisted for two and a half years. The discrepancies have made it possible for Republicans to herald a job recovery and for Democrats to deny one exists.
Both sets of statistics were issued by the government's Bureau of Labor Statistics, but they come from very different surveys. One, the establishment survey, which questions 160,000 employers, paints the bleak picture. The other, the household survey, which questions 60,000 people about whether they or other family members are working, paints the better picture.
Which is right? Because of its smaller sample size, the household survey is always more volatile, and month-to-month changes can be deceptive for that reason. So economists normally pay more attention to the establishment survey. But the fact that they differ so drastically may mean that reality lies somewhere in between....
And, of course, what is missing is the context. A lot of smart people have been looking at the difference between the household and the payroll surveys, and have come to firm conclusions. Let me turn over the microphone to Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan to tell us what those conclusions are:
Greenspan Testimony February 11, 2004: 'I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate,' Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman, said in congressional testimony on Feb. 11. 'Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow.'... The Fed's conclusion was that the household survey's results had been inflated by overestimates of population growth.... If the population estimate is too high, the estimated number of jobs will also be too high. The bureau bases its population estimate on the 2000 census, but it then updates that estimate yearly with data on births, deaths and immigration. But immigration numbers are largely guesswork, because so much immigration is illegal. Fed officials suspect the immigration estimate is inflated because it fails to reflect tighter immigration controls since Sept. 11, 2001, as well as declines caused by the economic slowdown.
Not a hint of this context is mentioned.
Later on in the article, other red herrings are dragged out: the claim that the difference between the household and the payroll surveys is because more people are self-employed. The household survey asks people if they are self-employed. Only ten percent of the difference between the household survey and the payroll survey can be attributed to self-employment.
Posted by DeLong at August 7, 2004 09:31 AM | | Other weblogs commenting on this postWhen i clicked through to the Times, i was surprised to discover that floyd norris wrote this.
floyd norris is usually much better and more reliable. i wonder why he wasn't this time?
this is, of course, the kind of thing that public@nytimes.com (daniel okrent) should be for, not discussions of the coverage of the tonys or whether the times reports enough about the downside of gay marriage....
Posted by: howard on August 7, 2004 10:34 AMWhat howard said about Floyd Norris. At least the issue is being raised, and several points made here and on other economic blogs are mentioned, including people's propensity to lie (or inflate their situation) on the household survey, and the fact that the two tend to converge over time.
Posted by: masaccio on August 7, 2004 11:04 AMwhy Norris did his hack job - see his column from the day before - he predicted strong job growth. Was not willing to admit he was wrong. Simple as that.
Here's the link - http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/business/06norris.html
Posted by: Armando on August 7, 2004 11:39 AMThe good news is that DeLong's favorite whipping boy, Jonathan Weisman, has written something good:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46654-2004Aug6.html
Of course, the excellent Mike Allen may have done the heavy lifting.
Posted by: praktike on August 7, 2004 03:24 PMOver the past 6 months, the total increase in employment has been 1.1 million regardless of whic series one looks at - albeit the series have a lot of month-by-month noise in them. As I note over at Angrybear, the noise presents Chao and Snow the opportunity to mislead the public on a month by month basis. But then, they might have to per Rovian order since labor supply has grown by about 1 million. Alas, the White House cannot be honest that employment growth is not reducing excess supply by much at all,
Posted by: pgl on August 7, 2004 03:34 PMDeja vu. Didn't we have this discussion some time ago? When was it exactly? I seem to recall that something happened that finally put a stop to the Rep spinmeisters prattling on about how much more accurate the household survey was. Shut them up good. Wasn't it when the household survey employment numbers took a dive and the payroll survey showed more employment?
Or was this just some dream I had?
howard: If there is a downside of gay marriage I'd like to hear it. I can talk all day and all night about the downsides of straight marriage.
Posted by: Barry Freed on August 7, 2004 05:27 PMbarry, what i'm referencing is daniel okrent's column about how, in certain respects, the ny times is liberal on account of how there have been several articles in the times favorable to gay marriage and none discussing, fer instance, spousal abuse in gay couples (you may think i'm kidding, but i'm not; this is really what okrent wrote, and while i'm afraid that this article has disappeared behind the you-gotta-pay curtain, since it was a couple of weeks ago, he really wrote it!).
Speaking personally, i have no doubt that gay marriages, like straight marriage, will also end up in divorce, or with spousal abuse, or other problems, some percentage of the time, but as someone wrote to the times in response to okrent's column, when the '60s civil rights movement was calling for desegregation of, for instance, buses or swimming pools, it wasn't the obligation of the times to discuss accident rates with city buses or numbers of drownings in community pools....
Posted by: howard on August 7, 2004 06:26 PMIsn't Norris guilty of a pretty straightforward logical error here, as well as of (pretended?) economic ignorance? Isn't this just the fallacy of the middle ground? If there are conflicting estimates, something in between just has to be right? Two strikes for this kind of thinking.
Posted by: kharris on August 7, 2004 10:07 PMhoward,
It was just kind of a throwaway comment. One which I am particularly inclined to make these days as I am have just passed through the eye of a divorce, my second (reference of course, is to the eye of a hurricaine, the hurricaine first hit when within weeks she demanded a divorce, then I found out for certain about the affair I had suspected she had been having, then she moved out. Some months of relative quiet (i.e. little or no contact) and now the hardball, beginning the terms of a legal separation agreement, etc.).
As for gay marriage, I think that at least for a decade, maybe longer, we're likely to see lower rates of divorce as it becomes commonplace, same old same old.
I would like a reply to the first part of my post though. So I'll know I'm not crazy like Condi (my nickname for her now) keeps telling me I am.
Posted by: Barry Freed on August 7, 2004 11:52 PMWe do of course realize that the increasing spread between household and payroll surveys is a very bearish sign for the economy.
Posted by: Stirling Newberry on August 8, 2004 10:22 AMSheesh. If the writers of the NYT business section don't know which survey to trust on job creation, it's all downhill from there, isn't it?
Posted by: RT on August 8, 2004 07:27 PM