Be Careful Evaluating Official Government Statistics

While computers and software grow ever more powerful, government analysts can be prisoners of the past. It is possible to perform robust assessments of economic trends, yet our government and other western ones generally refuse to do so. Many in the press are not truly comfortable with numbers--after all, they are gifted writers. This piece shows that private sector jobs (on a full-time equivalent basis) remain under peak 2008 levels inside America. Even so, real wages per job have risen only slightly. We are in a massive global labor glut, and the worst is yet to come--much more powerful, silent, and pliant machines stand ready to add more downward pressure on human incomes.