You Cannot Manage It If You Cannot Measure It

TW: We posted about the birth death model here last summer. The BLS continues to add jobs to their models via the model despite our being amidst a recession. Now the revisions (not solely related to the B/D model) are starting. A friend assures me the BLS is doing the best they can (and this is a non-partisan issue even though these revisions reflect activity primarily during the Bush administration). Regardless the depth of the Great Contraction as evidenced by the above graph is a post-war worst from a job perspective (note the graph is normalized to reflect population growth).

From Floyd Norris at NYT:
"In early 2008, a small band of people were arguing that we were in a recession. But the conventional wisdom — including at the Federal Reserve — was that the employment numbers said otherwise.

I remember people saying things like “you don’t go into recession when you are losing 60,000 jobs a month.”

They were right. It was the job numbers that were wrong.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics said today that it now thinks the economy lost 824,000 more jobs from April 2008 to March 2009 than it had previously estimated...

I suspect that the government and the Fed would have started trying to stimulate the economy much earlier had they had more accurate job figures."
http://norris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/02/recession-what-recession/