"Government Job Numbers Make No Sense"
June 26, 2023
Hey, can we at least get a couple of graduate students to work on this?
The headlines have focused on the so-called Establishment Survey which is a survey of employers and shows only the number of positions, not the number of employed persons. The Household survey, on the other hand, surveys people.
The Household survey over the past two years has not shown nearly as much job growth as the Establishment Survey.
Specifically, we find that since 2022, the Establishment Survey and the Household Survey have ceased to follow a similar trend, with a sizable gap forming between the two surveys. In fact, over the past two years, the two surveys show a gap of 2.2 million: