Latest news with #CurrentPopulationSurvey
Time of India
4 days ago
- Business
- Time of India
Youth is losing to experience in America's job market
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Every time there's fresh evidence of labor market softness, as with the July jobs report, an obvious question is raised about the health of the US economy. Now, increasingly, economists and employees are asking a second question: Are we seeing the impact of artificial intelligence on knowledge workers?There are plenty of signs that AI is making the job market tougher for young college graduates , but for the 22 million people with jobs that are categorized as professional and business services, wage growth has actually accelerated over the past year to levels solidly above pre-pandemic rates. This suggests that the state of the labor market for white-collar workers is best described as bifurcated — one where there are both winners and losers rather than one where most workers are worse the overall unemployment rate being a solid 4.2%, conditions for young workers are soft. Only 65.3% of 20- to 24-year-olds were employed last month, nearly three percentage points lower than the post-pandemic peak in January 2024, and roughly the same proportion as we saw in December 2008 following Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.'s collapse. For the millions of college graduates in the 22 to 29 age group, the unemployment rate stood at 3.7% in the first six months of the year, compared with 2.8% in 2019, according to Current Population Survey numbers are backed up by numerous news reports as well as comments from corporate executives on how they see AI transforming labor needs. Internship postings this spring were down. A recent Wall Street Journal report noted that the share of entry-level hires relative to all new hires has slumped by 50% since 2019 among the biggest technology companies, while another pointed to consultancy firm McKinsey putting together smaller but more experienced teams as it adds AI to the also becoming more common for CEOs to talk about AI eventually leading to significant layoffs. At Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc. and Microsoft Corp., employee headcount grew 64% between 2019 and 2022 but just 3% over the past three years. This comes at a time when the three tech juggernauts collectively plan more than $250 billion in capital expenditures over the next 12 months, suggesting that there's a tradeoff between investing in AI and hiring the number of jobs in the professional and business services' category of the non-farm payrolls data shrank slightly over the past year, wage growth accelerated to just above 5% in July. Compare that with 2019, when employment growth averaged 1.3% while wages rose 3.7%.One explanation for this is that there are composition effects at work. If companies aren't hiring young workers, who tend to be lower paid, we're going to get lower employment growth in professional and business services along with increasing average compensation levels, which could overstate the extent to which older, more experienced workers are getting there are reasons to believe some workers really are gaining from this phase of the AI boom. There's the pro athlete-type offers being made to the select few engineers building new AI models. Outside the tech sector, there's the experience of companies such as McKinsey, where 'mediocre expertise' is going away while specialized expertise becomes more valuable in combination with AI agents. That dovetails with Nvidia Corp. CEO Jensen Huang's prediction that workers who use AI will be fine in this reasonable for all workers to be uncomfortable with a technological innovation that hasn't disrupted most workers yet but where the ultimate outcome is so uncertain. There's no guarantee that the next generation of AI models won't come after workers with more advanced skills. It's also a far cry from the technology boom of the late 1990s, which was accompanied by broad-based employment, compensation and consumption the AI boom, it feels like the bigger it gets, the more losers there will eventually be, either from workforce disruption or a malinvestment-induced bust. Unless there are signs that it's leading to more winners than losers, this is a boom that understandably generates as much fear as it does optimism.
NBC News
7 days ago
- Business
- NBC News
Jobs data revisions are common. Here's how the process works.
President Donald Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, claiming that last week's jobs report 'was rigged' without providing any evidence. But former Labor Statistics officials say that the commissioner typically doesn't have a role in preparing the monthly jobs report. 'There's no way for that to happen,' said William Beach, Trump's nominee to be BLS commissioner during his first term, in a Sunday interview on CNN. 'The commissioner doesn't do anything to collect the numbers. The commissioner doesn't see the numbers until Wednesday before they're published. By the time the commissioner sees the numbers, they're all prepared. They're locked into the computer system,' Beach continued. So how does the BLS collect data for the jobs report? The process for preparing the monthly jobs report, formally known as the 'Employment Situation Summary,' starts with a survey of American households. The Current Population Survey goes out to about 60,000 households across the country, including about 2,000 trained employees interviewing people. The sample of households surveyed changes periodically and no household is surveyed more than four months in a row. 'Each month, one-eighth of the sample is interviewed for the first time, one-eighth for the second time, and so on. This rotation scheme has been in use since July 1953 and strengthens the reliability of estimates of month-to-month change as well as estimates of year-to-year change,' the bureau says in its website. The BLS also conducts a survey of government agencies and businesses, asking them for information about their workforce, hours worked and earnings data from their payroll records. That data is collected by BLS over the phone and digitally. After data from companies and agencies are submitted, BLS analysts review the data. All of the information submitted to the BLS is treated with strict confidentiality. Federal law authorizes the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect and process this information. Asked to provide evidence for Trump's claims of impropriety, National Economic Council director Kevin Hassett said on NBC's 'Meet the Press' that revisions made to prior months were 'the evidence.' Trump also said the revisions were evidence of someone manipulating the data, 'I assume in the hopes of getting 'Kamala' elected.' 'What you saw on Friday was the effect of trying to do a better job, getting more information,' Beach said, referring to the revisions. Erica Groshen, commissioner of the agency from 2013 through 2017, concurred and said revisions are not the sign of any manipulation. 'The important thing is to realize that revisions are not a bug. They're a feature, right? The BLS tries three different times to get employers to report how many jobs they have and sometimes the employers can't report it right away. So, the BLS imputes the number from behavior of other people, other companies like them, and history,' Groshen said on CNN on Friday. 'And [BLS] puts out the first monthly number because there's a lot of good information in it, but it's not complete. And then a month later it goes back and asks those employers again. They have another chance. And if they made a mistake, they have a chance to correct their mistakes. And it goes back a third time to make sure that they got it right,' she added. While response rates to the Bureau's surveys have been declining, researchers recently found that revisions and falling response rates did not reduce the reliability of the jobs and inflation reports. This style of surveying has been in use by the agency for seven decades. Despite the old-fashioned style of surveying households through the mail and in-person interviews, the first-release estimates of jobs added or lost each month has been getting more and more accurate over time, according to Yale Budget Lab director Ernie Tedeschi. Once data is gathered from companies, government agencies and businesses, and reviewed by analysts, it is prepared and formatted for the monthly jobs report. That final report includes the number of jobs added that month, revisions for prior months, the unemployment rate and additional stats on jobs added or lost in a variety of industries across the economy. The Bureau of Labor Statistics uses this general method of data collection for other reports too. Those include monthly inflation figures and productivity reports. Commissioners at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while nominated by presidents, often serve across multiple administrations. For example, the commissioner nominated by president George W. Bush also served under President Barack Obama. Commissioner William Beach, nominated by Donald Trump, also served under President Joe Biden. And the fired commissioner Erika McEntarfer, who was nominated by Biden, had continued to serve under Trump. With questions about data reliability now front of mind, JPMorgan's chief U.S. economist Michael Feroli said Sunday that there really is no substitute for high quality nonpartisan data from the federal government. 'Having a flawed instrument panel can be just as dangerous as having an obediently partisan pilot,' he wrote. 'Moreover, one should not be under the illusion that the proliferation of private sector 'big data' indicators over the past decade can substitute for high quality federal data. In almost all cases these indicators are benchmarked to the federal data, as private sector data are very rarely nationally representative.'
Indian Express
03-08-2025
- Business
- Indian Express
Sacking over hiring numbers – how Trump has undermined US data collection
US President Donald Trump on August 1 fired Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), after the agency said that non-farm payrolls – or new jobs outside of agriculture – rose by just 73,000 in July, while the numbers for the previous two months were revised downwards by more than a quarter of a million to a mere 19,000 for May and 14,000 for June. The US President did not take too kindly to the data, saying the numbers were being 'rigged' to make him and the Republican party 'look bad'. 'We need accurate Jobs Numbers. I have directed my Team to fire this Biden Political Appointee, IMMEDIATELY,' Trump posted on Truth Social on August 1. McEntarfer's firing has been condemned by most outside the White House. The National Association for Business Economics, for instance, said the accusations against the BLS were 'unfounded' and 'threatens the long-standing credibility of our economic data infrastructure'. Staffing shortages Collecting quality data is difficult at the best of times. Surveyors all over the world, including in India, are facing the issue of lower response rates. According to the BLS, the household response rate in the Current Population Survey – which helps provide data on the labour force – has fallen from 88.3 per cent in April 2015 to 68.1 per cent in April 2025. But rising non-response rates is an issue that plagues all countries. In India, the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (MoSPI) has, for some time, been concerned by the increasing apathy of the upper class to government surveys, particularly households living in gated societies. In the US, there has been another challenge. On January 20, the Trump administration froze federal hiring, with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) aggressively cutting government jobs. This has affected data collection, with the Wall Street Journal reporting in June the BLS had told some economists that staffing shortage had led to Consumer Price Index (CPI) data being collected from fewer shops starting April. 'These procedures will be kept in place until the hiring freeze is lifted, and additional staff can be hired and trained,' the BLS said. As it turns out, the BLS suspended CPI data collection in the cities of Lincoln, Nebraska and Provo, Utah in April 'to align survey workload with resource levels'. In June, data collection in Buffalo, New York was suspended, with the BLS saying on July 29 that 'roughly 15 per cent of the sample in the other 72 areas also was suspended from collection, on average'. Meanwhile, the Trump administration's spending cuts for the current fiscal would lower the budget and headcount of the BLS by around 8 per cent. According to the Council for Community and Economic Research, this would limit the ability of the BLS' to meet growing demand for sub-state and real-time labour market data. 'The agencies, BLS included, are in survival mode,' news website Politico reported in June, quoting Michael Horrigan, a former BLS Associate Commissioner. 'You can't save that money simply by cutting sampling or cutting indexes. The only way to save that kind of money is by cutting survey programs.' To get around fewer CPI data points, the BLS has been using a technique known as 'imputation'. When a product's price is missing, it is derived from that of an item in the same category and same place – or 'home cell imputation'. For example: if the BLS does not have the price of a loaf of 100 per cent whole wheat bread in a selected store in Washington, DC, then the agency estimates the price from the price change for all types of bread in the same area. And if prices for all types of bread in the area are unavailable, then the BLS would take the price from a broader region – or 'different cell imputation'. India has seen its own cases of imputation, but only in extenuating circumstances. One such instance was the Covid pandemic, when prices of several items were not available due to restrictions on movement of people and lack of transactions. As a result, MoSPI used imputation to calculate CPI inflation for April 2020 and May 2020. But from a policy perspective, the Reserve Bank of India's Monetary Policy Committee treated these two inflation numbers as a 'break' in the CPI series. The problem for watchers of US CPI data is that the BLS has been increasingly using more and more imputation over the last one year – and of the worse variety. 'Different cell imputation' – in which price data from a wider region is used to guess missing numbers – made up 35 per cent of all imputed prices in June, up from just 8 per cent in June 2024. Nothing can make up for actual data collection. Siddharth Upasani is a Deputy Associate Editor with The Indian Express. He reports primarily on data and the economy, looking for trends and changes in the former which paint a picture of the latter. Before The Indian Express, he worked at Moneycontrol and financial newswire Informist (previously called Cogencis). Outside of work, sports, fantasy football, and graphic novels keep him busy. ... Read More
Yahoo
19-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
CBS News poll: Most Americans favor U.S. returning to moon, going to Mars
There is a lot of public favor for the idea of the U.S. returning to the moon, and also for eventually going to Mars. About two-thirds do, while a third does not. Younger Americans who are not old enough to remember the first moon landing are especially in favor, perhaps looking forward to seeing that exploration in their lifetimes. These views generally cut across ideological and party lines, as well. The first moon landing in 1969 continues to loom large in the public mind, all these years on — a big majority says it was worth doing, while just under a quarter says it was not. Views were comparable back when this was asked at the 40th and 50th anniversaries of it, too. That may be partly because, in general, Americans tend to think the space program adds at least somewhat to feelings of national pride. People tend to think it also contributes some — if not necessarily a lot — to technological contributions from which everyone can benefit. This CBS News/YouGov survey was conducted with a nationally representative sample of 2,404 U.S. adults interviewed between June 18-23, 2025. The sample was weighted to be representative of adults nationwide according to gender, age, race, and education, based on the U.S. Census American Community Survey and Current Population Survey, as well as 2024 presidential vote. The margin of error is ±2.6 points. Toplines Wall Street Journal reports Trump sent "bawdy" birthday letter to Epstein, Trump threatens to sue Medical expert on Trump's chronic venous insufficiency diagnosis President Trump sues WSJ publisher, Rupert Murdoch over Epstein letter story Solve the daily Crossword
Business Times
15-07-2025
- Business
- Business Times
Statistics and politics are a dangerous mix
HOW much longer can we trust government statistics? After staffing shortages at the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reportedly affected the agency's ability to collect data for the consumer price index (CPI) last month, a handful of Democratic senators wrote to the Department of Labor demanding to know how it affected the agency's statistics. Earlier this year, the government made the radical move to dissolve several external expert advisory committees that served the BLS and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Meanwhile, across industries as diverse as medicine, insurance and education, professionals are dealing with the outright disappearance of data from government websites. But to answer the question: We can trust the statistics at least until the 'Improving Performance, Accountability and Responsiveness in the Civil Service' regulation, proposed by the Office of Personnel Management in April, goes into effect. After that, all bets are off. The gaps in the CPI data and the dissolution of advisory committees illustrate the two threats facing government data: inadequate funding and political interference. The former has been cooking for a while. The BLS' budget is down 20 per cent in real terms since 2010, and President Donald Trump's 2026 Budget proposes an additional 8 per cent cut. Surveys aren't free to run or maintain, and they certainly aren't free to improve. The Census Bureau has long wanted to modernise the Current Population Survey – which produces one of the most paramount statistics of all, the unemployment rate. It recently designed a three-year plan to make the survey more accurate and cost-effective. Not for nothing, those advisory agencies and other outside experts had been sounding the alarm for more funding and pushing for modernisation in the collecting and publishing of public data. The threat of political interference, however, is new. It started during the presidential campaign last autumn, when monthly employment reports showed a strong labour market. Trump and his surrogates immediately accused the agency of producing 'fake numbers'. That cooled after he won – but if there is any kind of turn in the numbers, the false allegations will almost certainly arise again. BT in your inbox Start and end each day with the latest news stories and analyses delivered straight to your inbox. Sign Up Sign Up On one level, it's just empty if that destructive rhetoric undermines trust but doesn't affect the production of the numbers. Unfortunately, the administration's actions won't stop at rhetoric. In October 2020, Trump issued Executive Order 13957 to establish 'Schedule F' in the civil service. Its purpose was to reclassify federal employees in certain positions and make them subject to the hiring and firing discretion of the agency lead. In other words, the goal was to undermine merit-based hiring and replace it with political hiring. In January 2021, then president Joe Biden rescinded the order, but Trump restored it in January 2025. Under this new rule, federal employees whose jobs are reclassified lose their civil-service protections, which include appealing a termination they believe was based on political reasons rather than performance. This order was officially published in the Federal Register in April, and public comments – some 40,000 of them – were received until May. The administration is supposed to take the comments onboard and issue the final rule, which will then take effect 30 or 60 days later. If and when that happens, more details about how exactly it will work will be announced. But in practice, the president will have the ability to fire any federal employee he chooses. It is not hard to see how all this might create problems for government agencies such as the BLS. In 2019, former BLS Commissioner Erica Groshen was asked about the possibility of manipulating government statistics. She explained that it would be impossible for a political appointee to do so – because the staff would prevent it. 'If I had tried to do that while I was commissioner, I know with certainty that the first people to turn me in would have been the employees of the BLS,' she said. So to return to the question at the beginning: Government data is trustworthy because of civil servants, but they are in the administration's sights. Once the new rule reclassifying federal employees goes into effect, the staff that produces and maintains the data is at risk. And once they are, the data is, too. Of course, manipulating a report like the Current Population Survey would be difficult, given its depth of detail and the fact that all the raw data itself is released to the public. It's more likely that the government will just stop publishing the data to the same level of detail – so if there were some changes to the headline numbers, the reasons would be hard to verify. That seems to explain the public data that's already been pulled, whether it's about climate or Social Security Administration wait-time performance. Integrity and transparency are at the heart of public statistics. It's no surprise that they would be under attack by an administration that values neither. BLOOMBERG The writer is a labour economist and independent policy consultant
