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[FOR INTERNAL REVIEW] Bill Beach - What's Broken About the Bureau of Labor Statistics
Official labor statistics are the backbone of economic policymaking, and they were mostly designed in the 1950s. The man who ran BLS through the pandemic has a lot to say about what needs to change.
Topics covered:
Why BLS was built for a world of probability sampling that no longer works
How the design of a survey encodes a worldview
How Indigenous Americans had a 37% unemployment rate at the peak of the pandemic
What happened when the BLS commissioner was fired
How private data and official statistics compliment each other
Why the longitudinal survey of the Covid generation just got…
The skinny
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