Census report shows some fancy ‘foot’-work
TODAY I’m going to try your patience like never before. This column will be about footnotes.
Yes, footnotes — those strange little factoids full of Latin abbreviations and curious codes loved so much by college professors (and nobody else). Only today’s footnotes will come from the US Labor Department — and I believe not even a professor could love them.
But first, I have to get some basic stuff out of the way or my bosses might not pay me.
Labor reported Friday that the US economy created 252,000 jobs in December. That was more than experts expected for the month, but a lot less than the 321,000 jobs allegedly created in November — a number that, curiously, was revised after the normal review.
As I said last month, that blip in November jobs was caused by strange seasonal adjustments. So don’t make too much of the fact that December couldn’t live up to November’s hype.
But you should be disappointed in the December report for another reason. The average wage dropped a significant 5 cents an hour in December, which means that whatever jobs were created weren’t good ones.
And the unemployment rate dropped to 5.6 percent in December from 5.8 percent in November, which would seem to be good news. But don’t get too excited about that number, either. The decline was caused by 273,000 workers leaving the workforce.
Why did they leave the workforce? It’s probably because they couldn’t find jobs, so they stopped looking. And the way Labor keeps tabs, these people no longer count as unemployed.
People could also be leaving the workforce because they’ve suddenly become very rich and no longer need to work. Hey, you never know!
If 2014’s numbers hold up on revision, this would be the best year for job creation since 1999. The bad news is this: There are now 138.3 million jobs in this country. And that’s just 93,000 more than the peak in November 2006.
Keep in mind that a lot of new people have been trying to enter the workforce during the past eight years. But that pace of job growth won’t allow it. And because wages on new jobs are low, many people are doubling up in the workforce.
Now I’ll keep my promise about footnotes — before you die of excitement. Eyeballing it, the threepage press release on Friday from Labor is about 50 percent footnotes. And that’s a lot, even for a yearend report.
You’ll have to look for yourself on BLS.gov, because I don’t have the space for all of them. But there are footnotes (actually boxed off in the body of the release) on “Revisions of Seasonally Adjusted Household Survey Data”; “Revisions in the Establishment Survey Data”; “Upcoming Changes to the Household Survey”; “Upcoming Changes to the Employment Situation News Release”; and “Revisions of Seasonally Adjusted Household Survey.”
The Household Survey measures the nation’s unemployment rate. The Establishment Survey comes up with the number of jobs created each month.
Oh yeah, I’m supposed to make a point in these columns, so here it is: When statisticians keep changing the way they make calculations, the data can’t be compared with prior periods. So what good is it?
It’s like when a baseball team keeps moving the fences closer and farther away. Can you really compare home run totals? Nope Another one bites the dust. William Hatcher, known to his friends and colleagues as Wayne, retired last month from the Census Bureau. Hatcher was the associate director of field operations and was in charge of quality control.
As you probably already know, I don’t think he was controlling the quality of the bureau’s data very well. But a couple of months ago, Hatcher told Census workers in a memo that the bureau had an “unblemished reputation for producing quality data.”
That same memo warned workers about falsifying data and said they would be required every year to sign a “policy agreement on maintaining data integrity.”
I suggested in an earlier column that it might be time for Hatcher to go into retirement if he really believed that propaganda. Hatcher reportedly worked for Census for more than three decades.
I’d like to wish him many golden years.
Hatcher is one of a number of people who’ve retired since I started asking questions about the quality of Census data.
In case you’d like to apply for Hatcher’s old job, go to USAJobs.gov and find it under the code ES034000/00. But you’d have to be willing to accept between $120,749 and $181,500 a year. “As the Associate Director you will be technically and administratively responsible for the quality, timeliness and pertinence of the work performed in the divisions and offices that report to you ...” says the job description.
Not written is the fact that the associate director will also have to put up with me looking over his or her shoulder until I’m satisfied Census has its act together.