The November Employment Report

We got another of the monthly employment reports today.  As has been the case in recent years, it either doesn't tell us anything or it tells us too much.  Let me explain.  There were plenty of jobs supposedly created; the unemployment rate went way down by much more than the number of jobs created would indicate likely; and the average wages for American workers fell.  None of these three things go with the other.  If we get 170,000 jobs, then we ought to have a corresponding impact on the unemployment rate; we didn't.  If unemployment drops a lot, then there ought to be a rise in wages as it gets harder to find good employees; there wasn't.  What we really know is that at most one of these three things is likely to be accurate, and it well may be that none are accurate.

A few years back, there was a scandal when workers in some offices doing the surveys on which these figures are based were found to be making up data that was subsequently used in the results.  Is that going on again?  Is the whole system so flawed that it needs to be overhauled?  It sure seems like that is the case here.