Nonfarm payroll employment falls by 701,000 in March; unemployment rate rises to 4.4% https://t.co/1Y9cSWJUIB #JobsReport #BLSdata
— BLS-Labor Statistics (@BLS_gov) April 3, 2020
How does this report jive with the unemployment claims?
Unemployment Insurance Weekly Claims
Initial claims were 6,648,000 for the week ending 3/28 (+3,341,000).
Insured unemployment was 3,029,000 for the week ending 3/21 (+1,245,000).https://t.co/ys7Eg5LKAW
— US Labor Department (@USDOL) April 2, 2020
We have two options. First we could claim conspiracy or we can understand how the data is collected.
The job total data is collected from a monthly survey. The survey is fielded for a week. The week it was fielded is the middle of the month. This is standard procedure.
However, we are not in standard times. The survey was in the field before most of the state led social distancing began. We are seeing the pre large scale social distancing universe with a twenty day delay.
The unemployment claims are derived from weekly, state level, administrative data. The first week of March was a totally typical week. And then things went to shit.
Understanding how data is collected is important when weird things happen. The March survey is effectively useless as a meteor hit the US economy right after the survey was brought back in from the field. April data will show a better appreciation of reality but that fuzziness is an artifact of data collection methods and not anything nefarious.
Immanentize
How many times have I read people here saying they wanted a meteor strike on this administration?
Barry
And it’s worse, since both of the killer weeks had truncated numbers from overwhelmed systems. We know that each week should be reported #+X, and we don’t know X, except that it’s
vaster than anything in the historical recordsrather large.Robert Sneddon
@Immanentize:
You called?
Jerry
*jibe
clay
Is it supposed to be the same tweet twice?
Doug
Seconding Jerry @4, and also both embedded tweets are the same.
cmorenc
So…is the 700k fall is actually a two to three week view back in the rear-view mirror (because the underlying comparative data is that old) – and hence lags what the actual current first-week-of-April impact is? So what the figures will be reported third week or so in April will likely be a far deeper cliff-fall than what is apparent from the 700k figure reported this week?
Just restating what I think you just said David, to make sure I clearly understand your point.
dmsilev
@cmorenc: Yes, that’s exactly right. I’ve seen various estimates of what the unemployment rate is right now, based on those weekly claims numbers and so forth. Those estimates are all around 10% or higher.
scav
This is making me go back to the housing bubble somehow!
ETA one was a survey of firms for data and the other was based on actual claims — probably the same?
Jinchi
What this tells me is that over the next several weeks we can expect Trump spouting nonsense like,
“Some of these numbers in the fake news media, 3 million, 7 million people filing for unemployment in a week? BLS says it’s 700,000 for all of March.”
“I don’t think it’s lying, I think it’s fraud, but check it out. Check it out. I don’t know, I don’t know. I think that’s for other people to figure out.”
And ending April with.
“We did a very good job. Models predicted we would lose 100 million jobs. I held it down to 30 million.”
Roger Moore
@Immanentize:
This is a meteor that’s hitting the country as a whole, and our best hope is the administration will be collateral damage. I think the people saying “Bring On The Meteor” were hoping for either a precision strike or one big enough to put the whole country out of its misery, not this intermediate stuff.
Chief Oshkosh
@Jerry: And data ARE plural.
Data that do not jibe are a bunch of jive.
I’m sure Jerry is just as popular at parties as I am.
sylvainsylvain
I work in the field collecting the BLS data. My state (OK) wasn’t doing a lot of distancing at that point; it was just starting to hit.
Our regional office changed the procedure we followed during the weekly survey. That meant no personal visits, only phone contact.
My take on the way the week played out, based on the individuals I interviewed, is that it hadn’t quite exploded yet. The only people not working were teachers and the self-employed. This next month will show more, assuming we can get good data. The ‘no personal visits‘ will impact this; some people need to be nudged into talking w us.
Jerry
@Chief Oshkosh:
HA! I’m old enough to realize that my kind are not wanted at fun parties anymore. /sigh
lumpkin
This game gets old, but if a Democrat was president the republicans would be screaming about her cooking the books.
Dev Null
Justin Wolfers has a ‘splainer here.