Seasonal Incompetence Disorder
This past Friday, the BLS released its monthly jobs report: unemployment rate down to 5.5%, and 295K jobs added in the month of February. The details of the report are here. Policy makers look to the employment numbers to gain insight regarding economic trends: are more people seeking work? Are more businesses hiring? Tracking these trends can better inform economic policy making. However, in a recent WSJ Op-Ed, Daniel Quinn Mills, a professor of business administration at Harvard took issue with how the BLS data are reported. Employment data is often impacted by seasonally-recurring phenomena. For example, the 295K “jobs added” figure Continue reading Seasonal Incompetence Disorder