This is just a trope you guys tell yourselves. There’s no evidence basis for it. Where you have public transit, it’s heavily used, even if you won’t do it. You sound like Thatcher about people taking buses (it’s a notorious quote, look it up)

It’s also not true that these reports are more often revised down than up. Instead, they are revised down a bit more often in periods of contraction, up a bit more often in periods of growth, and revised less and in no particular direction in periods of stability

It doesn’t quite work like that. Some users need to prioritise timeliness over accuracy (eg traders and investors) and others need vice versa (eg academics). The former would rather act fast and live with the risk of acting on somewhat inaccurate data. The Fed, for example, cannot afford to wait two months for revisions before making interest rate decisions. Their choice is decide on the basis of incomplete data or decide on the basis of no data.

Here’s a good program about this

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/p...

Possibly, but unlikely. The discrepancy would have shown up sooner. The most obvious explanation for the discrepancy is that the economy is weakening faster than the CES birth-death model can respond.

It’s typically going to be better than buses, due to scale economies and lower rolling resistance. Depends on load factors etc, and EV buses have cut the gap, but steel wheels on rails vs rubber on roads is a big advantage

That’s a direct result of the discouragement of investment in trains in the US. Elsewhere in the world, a train is a comfortable and safe experience.

But you need to know enough to know whether to be concerned by a 25 to 50% revision. For example, you’d need to have detailed expert insight into the CES birth-death model and how it responds to fast economic contractions to come to an informed view of whether the downward revisions of May and June this year were implausible or not. And you’d have to be able to understand the cause, and rule out the more likely cause, which experts have said is that the early estimates have been consistently too *optimistic* for many months.

The much more plausible reason for somewhat more frequent downward revisions of the CES data since 2023 is that the economy is contracting faster than the BLS’s model can adapt to in real time, especially in the small-firm sector. Consequently, downward revisions (due to the birth-death model) are entirely expected. This doesn’t indicate a flaw in the BLS process per se — just a lag in modeling adjustment during a turning point in the business cycle.

The rapid economic contraction since 2023 has meant the BLS birth-death model is overestimating the number of new businesses, and underestimating closures. This causes *early* CES estimates to be biased *upward* — the complete opposite of what you think is happening.
Later, when more complete data arrives (e.g., through late reports or benchmarking to unemployment insurance records), the overestimation gets corrected — resulting in downward revisions.

It’s really great to see an informed comment on here. There was an interesting discussion of this on More or Less on the BBC, a few weeks ago.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/p...

Re Trump, I will add: there is no “if” about whether he’ll attempt to cook the books. The MO is to cook and to lie at every conceivable opportunity, and to do it all without worrying about shame or hypocrisy or anything like that, because all that matters is ego (the numbers looking good) and power (holding on to it, and exercising it).

This is such a classic example of someone spouting confidently on a topic they know nothing about. I am a lay person, and even I knew immediately that you’d written a pile of crap about government reporting.

BLS stats have long been considered the global gold standard for employment data due to their technical quality, transparency, consistency over many years, and detail, among many other things. You mention Sweden in your “counter-factual”. SCB (Statistics Sweden) is well regarded, especially for innovation. But it doesn’t hold a candle to the BLS for granularity or frequency of data.

How the fuck this gets modified as insightful is completely beyond me. Every developed nation everywhere publishes key economic statistics in two forms: an early version that is directionally useful to decision-makers whose priorities are speed over accuracy, and a later revised version that is useful to decision-makers whose priorities are accuracy over speed.

For example: central banks, market participants such as traders and analysts, hiring managers in cyclical industries — all of these prefer to get early data to help them understand and manage risks right the fuck now, because the costs of waiting a couple of months for completely accurate data are just too high.

By contrast: government budget planners, academics and economic researchers typically need the most accurate data possible, because they are working on longer term horizons.

It is simply *impossible* for some types of data to be both accurate and fast. Survey data, for example, can only be accurate with a high response rate, and respondents can’t be coerced into replying sooner than they want to (or are able to, some data just takes a while to accumulate to respond to the survey).

You people don’t *have* to be ignoramuses your entire lives. You can choose to be better humans than that, you know.

The claim wasn’t “millions of dollars to execute”. The claim was that the exploits cost millions of dollars. It’s pretty obvious that the bulk of that cost is development and testing.

I love how you ask “but where could we put the infrastructure for e-bikes/bikes?” as though this is a really difficult problem no city has ever solved, studiously ignoring what’s been done in dozens of Dutch and Danish cities, in Vienna and Paris etc and that you think infrastructure for bikes is a question of painting lanes! I suspect default US mindset is happening

Yes. And on top of that, as miles travelled shift from cars to e-bikes, that too reduces injury rates, and of course has the health benefits mentioned in the original article. Modal shift to active transport is a huge benefit

It was a bit weird to see the summary talking about the US relying on imports for 90% of its coffee - surely much closer to 99%!