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Show Faulty Employment Statistics Lead To Confusion in Economic Planning ' The need for some better system of compiling figures on employment and unemployment has previously been called to 'public attention. Several month ago Senator O'Mahoney, chairman chair-man of the Joint senate-house economic committee, announced that the committee commit-tee was going to study the reliability of present statistics. Senator O'Mahoney at the time noted that May employment figures were' greater than any previous month of 1949, and greater than in May a year before, but still estimates of unemploy-xnent unemploy-xnent showed the total of jobless Increasing In-creasing steadily. That la far from being the only confusing con-fusing point about employment and unemployment un-employment statistics. Recently the U. S. bureau of labor atatiatics sn-, sn-, Bounced It has been overestimating non-agricultural non-agricultural employment for the paat three years, with the error becoming progressively greater. The bureau aaid U was w00,00f-too-Mgh on nowagrieul tural employment In 1947 and nearly million too high In June of this year. Nor ia that the whole atory. The bureau said all of the error waa In the manufacturing segment, where Uat June H Uated 1,175,000 more manufacturing workers than there really wereand furthermore moat of the error In manufacturing manu-facturing waa in Just a few lines of activitylumber, ac-tivitylumber, apparel and food. Still another bit of confusion came to light recently when two agenclea of the federal government made different differ-ent estimates of nonagricultural employment em-ployment Increases. The bureau of labor atatiatics said such employment increased in-creased about 400,000 between July and August of this year, whereas the bureau of the census estimated the increase at 1,400.000. Plainly such confusion in employment employ-ment statiatica is ridiculous. If one reporting re-porting agency lists more than a million fictitious jobs, and two agenciea of government gov-ernment differ by a million workera on their estimates of employment Increases, our statistics are practically worthless. If government, business and labor leaden are to make intelligent plans for the future economic welfare of th nation as a whole, and of individual businesses and workers, they must have reasonably accurate economic statistics on which to baae their Judgment. Otherwise we will constantly be doing the wrong thing-trying thing-trying to prime the economic pump when -what we ally need to do to-ahut-ott-some of the inflationary flow, or reducing government spending when what we need to do ia start job-making public works projects. Maybe it ia impossible to get accurate ac-curate employment atatiatics. That could be. But let's Wind out And if such statistics can't be accurate, let's quit kidding ouraelvea by compiling and reporting them. Let' depend on other, mora accurate, Indices of our economic status. |