When a majority of us hear about the employment numbers, we have this impression that some dedicated government worker went from business to business and house to house, asking "Are you working?" "Is your company hiring?" If only it were that straight forward.
Actually, the media is reporting 2 different surveys released by our federal labor agencies. First, there is the Establishment Data known as Current Employment Statistics (CES). Here, our intrepid government servant chats up 400,000 businesses out of almost 30 million. By talking with only 1 out of 75 businesses, the government releases its "number of jobs added" statistic. This is a wonderful way of figuring how many people are working. Yet, people seem to overlook the fact that it doesn't tell us how many people are not working.
In our next round of mathematical wizardry, our faithful political worker talks with 60,000 households (out of over 112 million) to count the number of people who are employed and unemployed. This is known as the Household Data or Current Population Survey (CPS). Based on the answers from 1 out of 1867 households, the government publishes its "unemployment rate". As you can imagine, no one asked anyone in those other 1866 households whether they were working or not. That piece of guess work is left up to the manipulators of statistics.
At best, the Establishment data shows how many jobs were lost from one month to the next; while the Household data shows the number of jobs that may have been created at the same time. With a little hype and political spin, you can make these numbers look as good or bad as you want the public to believe. Maybe.
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