BREAKING JOBS REPORT: Native born -656,000 jobs___ Foreign Born +310,000 jobs

Politics
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Top Line of the Jobs Reports reads

Both total nonfarm payroll employment (+50,000) and the unemployment rate (4.4 percent) changed little in December . . .

This news release presents statistics from two monthly surveys. The household survey measures . . .
The establishment survey measures . . .

And that is the top-line number the media reports and most people (historically) pay attention to.
CNBC ran the following headline and story:

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As always, I scrolled directly to Table A-7 and found:
– Native born -656,000 jobs
– Foreign Born +310,000 jobs

More in a bit

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Foreign Born

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Native Born

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(Reminder: I did not decide to categorize or name things this way. This is how BLS.gov does it and has always done it)

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So isn’t that backwards from a pro-USA direction. Hasn’t it been going in the other direction for quite a few months now? Maybe that was like a stretching rubberband that had to snap at some point. A few more months will tell us whether the previous points were data blips, or this one is.

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Yes, it is backwards from a pro-USA perspective.
And yes, it takes more than one month’s data to see a trend.

One way to do it is to compare this December to last December

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Does Foreign born include foreign born who are now citizens?

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It doesn’t matter really. It shows that @Gaius was right that illegals were in fact being counted and constituted a lot of the growth during the Biden admin

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50k jobs added is still 50k jobs.

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8

Probably.
That is from the “A tables” which is compiled via household survey.
BLS simply calls a bunch of people asks them
“Are you working?”
“Where were you born?”
etc.

Best guess? (seriously) They wanted to ask “Are yoy legal?” but figured they wouldn’t get trustworthy answers.
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The ‘science’ behind it is the same as with every gov’t survey.
People lie, but the % of people who lie does not change sharply from month to month.

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Couple interesting categories (% change Y-o-Y):

  • Total Private: up 0.5%

  • Manufacturing: down 0.5%

  • Computer & Peripheral Manufacturing down 3.1%

  • Semiconductor Manufacturing down 4.6%

  • Manufacturing Down 0.5%

  • Federal Gov’t Down 9.1%

  • Sightseeing up 20% ----> as old people buy epxeriences because their homes are already cluttered?

  • Couriers down 2.9% ----> Less Uber?

  • Entertainment up 5.2% ----> More OnlyFans??

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If native lost 600 and foreign gained 300, how are over all jobs up 50? What other class of worker is there besides foreign or native in that table?

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THAT mismatch is not as uncommon as we might think.
It happens a lot.

The answer lies in this

Two methods, two sets of questions.
Every month (regardless of who is president, what party, etc.)
The widely reported “topline” number comes from “The establishment survey.” (BLS surveys a bunch of employers, they report how many people are working for them.)

That number never quite matches anything on “The Household survey” and never quite matches any subcategory of it (such as the A-7 table that I track here every month.)

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The only concern for me is the Semiconductor Manufacturing being down about 5%.

Hopefully there are facilities being constructed and outfitted to soar ahead later this year.

Chips Act
Lets go Brandon.

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Huh. Big disparity.

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One of my friends’ small businesses that she works for
the paperwork changes coming out of the OBB.

Remember when the Republicans were the Party of Small Government?

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You mean, that same Act where the Trump Administration edited it to added ten percentage points to the semiconductor manufacturing tax credit?

And where they used $11.1 B in CHIPs grant money to buy the 9.9% stake in Intel?

That CHIPs Act?

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Yes.
One survey shows +50k, the other shows -340k.
That is a big difference.

The gov’t does a lot of “double” surveys, using two methods and
(GDP, CPI etc)

  • In the era of landlines, the two always matched pretty well.
  • as cell phones became more popular, the data deteriorated
  • in the post-COVID era the two often show differences large enough to raise eyebrows.

This trend exists not just with employment data but with other data such as GDP.

The conspiracy theory wing of MAGA (YAAARGH revisions!! Oooh Jekyll Island) are what you probably think, but there is a quantity of truth behind their assertions

17

One would think in this technical age we’d be much better at counting things like how many people have jobs, but we aren’t.

Sadly.

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Well . . . we are surveyng the subset of people who respond to phone spam so . . ..

EX1:
GDP is measured two ways. What people spend should equal what other people make. The two methods have never quite matched but fist wiht the cell phone era and then sharply post-COVID they don;t match nearly as well a sthey used to.

EX2:
For CPI purposes home prices (one-third of the CPI).
We survey people who do not avoid spam calls ask them if they are homeowners. If they answer “Yes” we ask them “What do you think your home would rent for?”

→ Seriously, it is THAT unscientific.
Homeowners have not been in the rental market for many years and are notoriously AWFUL at answering that question, but
The ‘science’ behind it is that, over time, the degree of mistakes is unlikely to change much, so we go with what we’ve got.

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for the second part of this perhaps AI can help scrape Facebook and Craiglist listings and come up with something better.

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Probably the BEST measrue for housing is the Case Shiller index . . . but it comes out 3 months behind.