Can We Still Trust U.S. Economic Data?

On Friday morning the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its jobs numbers for July. The nation provisionally added 73,000 jobs, shy of the 100,000 jobs expected. It wasn’t particularly good news.

More newsworthy, though, were the downward revisions for May and June. What had initially been reported as just shy of 150,000 jobs added each month, turned out to be closer to just 15,000 jobs per month. Quite plainly bad news.

The Trump administration first went to work spinning the numbers as the result of seasonal adjustments. By the afternoon, President Trump claimed on social media that the numbers were manipulated for political reasons and said that he’d directed his team to fire the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Erika McEntarfer.

I probably don’t need to tell you, dear listener, that this raises red flags. If you listen to this podcast, it’s probably because – in addition to finding me charming (lol) – you value what data can tell us about the world as it is, not the world as we might wish it to be.

For now, the acting director of the BLS is William Wiatrowski, the former deputy director. But the administration has said they’ll replace him within a matter of days and the question now is whether that new person might apply pressure within the bureau to make economic data look more like the president wishes it to be.

That’s what we discuss on today’s podcast and we’ve got an all star lineup to do it. Joining me is economics department chair at George Washington University Tara Sinclair. She’s been a visiting scholar at the St. Louis and Atlanta Fed banks, a technical advisor at the Bureau of Labor statistics, and founding chief economist at the job search site Indeed. Also with us is Ben Casselman, the chief economics correspondent at the New York Times, who worked with me at FiveThirtyEight back in the day.

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