Philip Bump of the Washington post explains and one can only wish the rest of the media would listen. Judging by the coverage today, they haven’t heard it yet:
The economic news that came first thing Friday morning was not what President Biden had hoped: the country added only 210,000 jobs in November, well below expectations and below the pace needed to replace the jobs lost since the start of the pandemic. But in 2021, the anodyne qualifier that the numbers are subject to revision is more important than ever. The odds are good that the November total is being underreported — as happened nearly every other month this year.
It happened in the November jobs report, too. Yes, the top-line number of 210,000 jobs wasn’t what economists or Democrats hoped to see. But there were also upward revisions to the September and October jobs numbers, by 67,000 jobs in the former and 15,000 in the latter.
The change to the September number is the second revision. The first increased the initial estimate by 118,000. In other words, the September jobs total was increased by 185,000 since it was initially reported as 194,000 — an initial report that was described as “disappointing.” Since that disappointing report, the estimated number of jobs added in the month has nearly doubled.
That’s happened repeatedly this year. Since 1979, the furthest back that Bureau of Labor Statistics data on revisions goes, the country has never added as many jobs in a year or seen such a large upward revision. The arrows below show the revision from the initial estimate (indicated with a line). Revisions are usually modest. Not this year.
[…]
It is important to remember that this is in part a function of the weirdness of the economy and the scale of the rebound in employment. You probably noticed that the other outliers on the graph of cumulative revisions were 2008 and 2020, years in which employment shifted dramatically because of economic shocks. Biden has benefited from the economy rapidly adding jobs as it recovers from the worst effects of the pandemic; that has both amplified the number of jobs “created” this year and undoubtedly contributed to the need to revise prior estimates. Because so many jobs have been added, the revisions are actually a relatively small percentage of the total. In past years, the revisions have been larger when measured relative to the total jobs numbers.
But this weirdness also serves as a cautionary note for the jobs report released on Friday. In 2021, at least, the initial number of jobs reported might be treated the way Mark Twain treated the weather in New England. If you’re not happy about it, wait a little bit.
Of course, that would require the press to report the revisions with the same intensity that they spread the alleged bad news when it first comes out. I’ve seen no evidence that they have ever done that.
The narrative is that Biden’s economy is is the ditch and at this point no amount of good news is going to derail it. Sadly, I suspect the only thing that would change it would be a big Democratic win in 2022 and this coverage makes that all the more unlikely.