Some months, it surprises me to find economists still putting out regular analyses of government employment statistics.  Perhaps I’m too jaded, but I’ve completely lost confidence in the data.

I used to have my monthly jobs review posts for both the Ocean State Current and the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity, but during the two years of overlap between the Obama administration in Washington and the Raimondo administration in Rhode Island, the numbers became difficult to take.  The huge revisions to the data began to seem conspicuously to help Democrats, which Raimondo amplified by using her many PR people to spin, typically by digging out any narrow cut of the data that would look positive.

At this point, our economy has become so distorted, I’m not sure the government statistics would be accurately describing the job market even if they were objectively collected and presented.

If I’m remembering the plot correctly, the 2005 movie, Land of the Dead, imagined a world in which living humans had taken refuge in cities while zombies wandered the suburbs.  One character observes that the zombies seemed to have become more cognizant, with some of them going about the trappings of their previous lives, like pretending to work a gas station.

That’s how analysis of economic data feels to me now.