Article #6

This Stockman article centers around the subject of seasonal adjustment, specifically its problems. Seasonal adjustment is a statistical procedure used because there certain times of the year where the economy produces more goods and services than usual. (Such as December when a ton of holiday shopping is going on. David Stockman is obviously not a big man of the way economist or, as he would call them, "statistical wizards" come up with the adjusted numbers. He refers to their seasonal adjustment system as a "pretentious stab in the dark" , an"invent(ed) guesstimate made year after year" and last but not least, not a science but simply "political fiction".I guess it's not the fact that seasonal adjustment is happening but more so that there are a ton of deviations that mess up the whole seasonal adjustment procedure. For example, the BLS takes into account that December is cold. But the fact that it doesn't get more specific than "cold", creates a less realistic number and seasonal adjustment. Which leads to the seasonal adjustment for jobs averaging 320,000 for the last 12 years.  This reminds me of the fixed basket that CPI uses. It's a problem since this fixed basket doesn't take into account things such as an unmeasured quality change, substitution bias, and introduction to new goods.  It seems as though the BLS is using seasonal adjustment to come up with a prettier number in the number of jobs added. But even that can't hide the fact that "the domestic economy is dead in the water". What lesson do we learn from this article? The same one we've learned in the previous ones. We're F#cked.