«I’m starting to believe that the modest job gains may well have been real …»
Perhaps Paul Krugman would have been better off not putting his first thoughts out on social media. After a stunningly positive jobs report this morning, many media figures found themselves a bit wrongfooted over the contradiction against expectations. Rather than simply disputing the outcome from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, though, the New York Times columnist suggested that Donald Trump corrupted the analysts to get a false boost:
This being the Trump era, you can’t completely discount the possibility that they’ve gotten to the BLS, but it’s much more likely that the models used to produce these numbers — they aren’t really raw data — have gone haywire in a time of pandemic 3/
Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) June 5,2020
Why not just stick with “quirky”? After all, the data is very quirky these days, thanks to unprecedented government intervention to shut down commerce over the last two months. Data from BLS and the Department of Labor paint contradictory pictures, which is why most economists expected another month of massive job losses rather than the biggest gain in 80 years of monthly BLS jobs reports. Questions about the models certainly seem appropriate, even if those are defensible with the data at hand.
Accusing Trump of somehow co-opting a federal bureaucracy to explain the numbers is, on the other hand, tinfoil hat territory.
