
FELIX SALMON: There Is Something Fishy About The Government's Official Jobs Numbers
• Business InsiderNo, he's not alleging political interference. But he does make this point.
The jobs numbers have been ultra-steady, despite the fact that there's an expected 100K margin for error each month.
Every month, economists and traders look first at the headline jobs growth number: this month, it’s 155,000. Last month, it was 161,000. Which means the difference is just 6,000. That difference, from month to month, is what I’m charting here. Sometimes the difference is positive and sometimes it’s negative, but if you just look at the magnitude of the change, then over the past two years, the typical number has differed from the previous number by an average of 51,000, with a median of 30,000. And over the past five months, the changes have been much smaller still.