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Title: An Unresponsive Public Is Undermining Government Economic Data

Link: https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/16/0619228/a...

An anonymous reader shares a report: Anyone who surveys the public, from
marketers to pollsters, struggles nowadays to get people to answer their
questions. That phenomenon afflicts crucial government data, making it harder
for policymakers and investors to know the true state of the economy. Falling
survey participation is an important reason the flagship jobs report released
every month by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, part of the Labor Department,
has undergone such big revisions recently. This has rippled into the
political sphere. On Aug. 1, President Trump fired BLS Commissioner Erika
McEntarfer after a particularly large downward revision to jobs for May and
June that owed partly to late responses from survey participants. The White
House and top administration officials increased their attacks on the BLS
last week after the agency published an annual revision suggesting the U.S.
added 911,000 fewer jobs over the 12 months through March. The BLS blamed the
initial overestimate partly on response rates. [...] One hypothesis is known
as survey fatigue: People are being asked to answer too many questionnaires.
Jonathan Eggleston, a senior economist at the U.S. Census Bureau, found in a
2024 study that recent participants in that agency's monthly and annual
surveys, which are voluntary, were less likely to answer the 2020 census by
mail, phone or online, without a knock on the door. Another is the rise of
cellphones with caller ID. In the days of landlines, people had to pick up
the phone to know who was calling. These days, many decline to answer callers
they don't recognize.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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