Employment data come from surveys!

Government statistics suffer from significant processing noise and shifting patterns of nonresponse biases (just like political polls)

People who don’t answer surveys cause biases in the things they measure. The methods researchers use to adjust for those biases can add further noise to those estimates.

These are two important facts of survey sampling that people too often forget. In politics, they mean pre-election polls can miss the mark because the people picking up the phone (or log…