Today’s monthly jobs report saying that the economy added more than 500,000 new jobs in January, combined with the recalculation of some prior months to add an additional aggregate 500,000, is hard to process. Generally, I didn’t think January is a big employment month – the seasonal jobs created for the Christmas season are gone, the weather is cold, and businesses are just beginning to think how to approach the new year.

In addition, as you may know, there are a number of private companies who do their own polling and are usually pretty accurate. Earlier this week, I heard a report of one of those surveys, suggesting that the job increase in January this year would be about 150,000, much lower than previous months, with a suggestion that one week of winter storms had led to the low estimate, with the other weeks showing more hiring.

Isn’t it unusual for this private estimate to be so far off?

Well, get this……

I asked Professor Google what they thought (they, the appropriate pronoun for the singular, non-binary professor), and they told me that one year ago, in January 2022, the estimates of the private polling companies was that the job growth would be about 150,000 at best, with some even predicting job losses, but that in fact the real number turned out to be 467,000 new hires. And, to top it off, last year, like this year, the numbers for December and November were recalculated, adding another 700,000 jobs.

Someone needs to explain how the two January results could be so hard to understand, yet so strikingly similar.

I have written before about the way jobs are calculated. I posted on Facebook on February 4, 2022, when the 467,000 was released, just a year ago. Even that was not the first time I addressed this topic, but here is what I said:

“I have written in detail before about the problems in the way the government reports employment data. Not taking into account people who decide not to look for jobs, not showing the difference between long term and short term employment. And who knows what they do about gig work, self employment, part time work, etc. But today’s good job news does sort of take the cake. 467,000 new jobs in January in spite of Omicron (with over 7,000,000 saying that they missed time last month because of Omicron), many more than the expected 150,000.

But what was more surprising were the increases in the December and November figures. 300,000 more jobs in December and 400,000 more jobs in November than originally reported. OK, great, another 700,000.”

What explains the two parallels? First, that the private estimates of January hiring were so much lower than the official calculations, and by virtually the same amounts? And, second, what was it about the November and December calculations each year that led to such enormous revisions?

Are there problems with the calculations themselves, or with the premises on which the calculations were based? Until we get an answer to these questions (which I assume somebody other than me is asking), what can we trust?