| As you may have heard, the government released numbers indicating that the unemployment rate dropped to 9.7% in January. Hooray! You may also have heard that the country lost 20,000 more jobs. Um, boo? Your natural reaction (as was mine) might be: how does that happen? How do we lose jobs, but still have reduced unemployment? It's not that swine flu, is it? Nope. As explained in this great blog post at NPR, the data come from two different surveys: one of employers (which gave us the 9.7% figure) and another of households (which showed the drop). The differences between these two surveys are more fully fleshed out by a piece at FoxNews.com, which explains that while the Bureau of Labor Statistics' employers poll covers more people, the survey of households is statistically significant, covering over 100,000 homes. The truth, of course, lies somewhere beyond these approximations. December's employment figures, for example, were recently revised downward from an estimated 85,000 jobs lost to a whopping 150,000. In other words, take a look at the numbers released today - but be prepared to revisit them in a month or two. |
