Socratt, good question. If 550,000 (net) jobs were lost last month, why did unemployment rate only rise by two-tenths of a percent? Answer: some of the unemployed stopped looking for work. The household survey compiles the # of unemployed. The # of jobs is more of a payroll total coming from employers.
By the way, your chance of being interviewed in any given month are about 1 in 3000.
Arraya, your reference to that blog is a good one, as it brings up one valid complaint to the way the BLS compiles their statistics. The Birth/Death allowance supposedly allows for the imputed jobs created or destroyed monthly by the birth of new businesses or the death of same. Their model is greatly flawed because it overstates job creation. It recently, for example, claimed that construction jobs are still growing in the U.S. A Barron’s columnist, Gene Epstein, has frequently mocked the BLS for these conclusions.
Still, the erroneous numbers are not large in the scheme of things, and are due more to bureaucratic sloth than dark conspiracy.
