Why the New York Times is wrong about a jobs recovery

Not only the New York Times, but most of mainstream media in general -- what's the problem? The BLS model is bad, it only goes back 3 years, therefore the DATA is bad upon which its ASSUMPTIONS are based: "The BLS only looks at the past 3 years to figure out what a "typical" September (or October or November, etc.) looks like. So, if there's, say, a once-in-three-generations financial crisis in the fall, it could throw off the seasonal adjustments for quite awhile. Which is, of course, exactly what happened. The BLS's model didn't know about Lehman. It only knew about the calendar. So it saw all the layoffs in late 2008 and early 2009, and interpreted them the only way it knew how: as seasonality, not a shadow banking run. And that messed things up for years. Because the BLS's model thought the job losses from the financial crisis were just from winter, it thought those kind of job losses would happen every winter.... Just how bad are the data? Well, keep in mind that the jobs report's margin of error is supposed to be about 90,000. But these post-crisis seasonal errors have almost doubled it to about 170,000. That's right: the jobs report's real margin of error has been about as big as the average jobs report itself the past few years.... (source infra) 

That's right--when you read in the New York Times (based on a BLS report) that 170,000 jobs were created last month, the ACTUAL figure could be -0-. Garbage in, garbage out.

How Bad Data Warped Everything We Thought We Knew About the Jobs Recovery - Matthew O'Brien - The Atlantic: "Bottom line: Almost six and a half years (mid 2007) ago two million more people were working than are employed today. That's an extremely dismal record " (READ more at link above)

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