A fair amount of furor has arisen over Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which as its name suggests, provides the crucial data on employment in the US. This is a pretty large organization with a substantial budget. It has ample resources. The data it produces are relied upon by businesses, policymakers, investors and others. The two most important sources for that data are a household survey relating to employment and a business survey relating to jobs. Somehow for a very extended period of time, the response rates to these surveys has been allowed to become and remain low, far too low for statistical comfort. In addition, it appears the BLS has inadequate methodology to correct for the potential issues caused by low response rates. Other data sources are also available that could be used instead of or to supplement the surveys. The BLS appears to have done nothing to address these issues, because we continue to see, as we did in the most recent report, extremely large revisions that completely change the perspective on what trends are with jobs and employment. So the firing is well justified and we can only hope that someone is hired who will fix the glaring shortcomings in the BLS’ work.
And the most important trend to note in what has been reported is the fall in the number of foreign born workers and rise in domestically born ones. The foreign-born workers decline is all due to illegal aliens no longer being let into the country and many being deported or leaving. This has resulted in job vacancies but it appears that those vacancies are in fact being filled by native-born workers or legal immigrants. Pay is increasing which suggests that it was very true that the illegal immigrants were displacing legal workers at a much lower pay. How could they complain about what they were paid? The higher pay to legal workers may be an inflationary factor, that depends on whether legal workers are more productive than illegal ones. But what the higher pay does for sure is ensure that those who work for a living get paid fairly, and we are talking about job categories where lower pay is common. These people need to be paid what the market would demand, not something influenced by the availability of illegal workers.
Interesting, as always; thanks. It occurs to me that part of the increase in resident workers could be due to increases in eVerify scamming, but I’m not sure there’s any way to know.
Kevin’s statement – “Somehow for a very extended period of time, the response rates to these surveys has been allowed to become and remain low, far too low for statistical comfort. ”
That statement is spot on –
Good job numbers require good sampling techiques. The response rates have been declining for several years and the steps to correct or alleviate the problem have made the quality of the data worse, not better.