What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable

The phrase "when US data becomes unreliable" is misleading in one sense: for many years political manipulation of economic data has screwed things up.

Calculation of unemployment and real debt has seldom matched the norms of most other western countries. Add military (often black budgets) spending without much oversight or accurate accounting.

The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.' Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses.

It’s amazing and terrifying watching an empire die

Speaking of US economic data reliability:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/13/business/economy/inflatio...

Story title:

Change in Data Sources Led to Lower Inflation Reading

Excerpts:

“On its merits, you can defend the change,” said Omair Sharif, founder of Inflation Insights, a forecasting firm. “Optically, it’s just not a good look in an environment when people are worried about political interference.”

Mr. Sharif said he did not believe the change was politically motivated. But Courtney Shupert, an economist at MacroPolicy Perspectives, another forecasting firm, said such decisions undermine public confidence in the statistical system.

“It seems like we are moving to more of a vague, uncertain, cloudy data quality environment that is going to make market participants less confident in the data that we do receive,” Ms. Shupert said.

The claim that economic data was ever 'accurate' is flawed. The real signal lies in the variability over time.

That will lead to serious problems, as in the case of China, underestimating threats lead to losing edge, from EV to robots and other vital tech, and without experts to ground policy in reality, the country risks making erratic market moves and failing to spot risks from adversaries like China or Russia.Add to that inexperienced staff in the administration who makes the U.S. easier to manipulate.

Wouldn't it be funny if they "fixed" spam calling in order to make it so that the government could call people again?

[flagged]

The article says: US Government surveys are suffering from poor response rates and decreasing budgets so business leaders will have to explore other options to improve reliability.

This thread says: American Empire is dying and the world is a fraud.

Are all of you bots? Is apocalyptic cynicism this widespread? Fact is that most of the world already gets by with a fraction of the economic data we produce. We have enjoyed an incredibly high standard for breadth, depth and quality of data and it's now proving unsustainable. Political manipulation thus far remains a specter to be wary of, but there's no indication any headline numbers are inaccurate. The downstream affects on policy are equally off in the distance maybe never to appear.

"The change may cause policymakers to misjudge the economy’s health, investors to lose confidence in the reliability of the data, and the public to disengage from participating in official measures altogether."

Many neoliberal Western countries with good data have completely fumbled their economies post-GFC and post-Covid, just look at Canada's disastrous GDP per capita growth.

US economy data is not even WORM data anymore, lol. Let alone to be accurate.

One of the things I do like about the US, and that I think is a reason for America's ability to meet the challenges this country faces is that it has good data collection and aggregation mechanisms: from the seemingly-banal surveys and so on to satellite remote-sensing.

There's three more years to go but afterwards (and perhaps even post the mid-terms) we should be able to hammer back some of this nonsense like being upset about job reports not showing favourable information and so on. Good information allows good decision-making and it's important we don't break that. Hopefully the current surge of low-quality corrupt executive choices isn't met by a counter-surge that kicks out people like Jerome Powell because he's a multi-millionaire capitalist or whatever.

I think it won't be. The establishment folks are mostly sensible. It's the new crop of "no property tax" and "no income tax for tips" and "no tax for under $100k earners" and so on that makes me worried, but I'm hoping it will all settle down soon.

We'll have to find better surveying methods than the phone surveys but provided #2 and #3 are solved in the article, which is just a matter of switching the admin, then we should be able to.

[dead]

the comment section for this post is a shit show, most of the main comments have been downvoted to gray-land.

People in Florida, when I tell them about my background working with data, often scoff and claim that the data can be changed to spread lies. They have a government who arrested a data scientist when she published information about Coronavirus. This is prevalent across all of America, especially after DOGE, who encourage fraud so the data supports their political interests.

I think the reliability problem is very bad. It's not just that the US government is encouraging fraud, it's also that the average American hates AI and data science. Usually, the public would prefer reliable data, but in this case, Americans seem to prefer corruption just to spite the AI.

We're certainly living in a post-truth country. By vilifying higher education, the assumption that Americans can interpret data is challenging. Therefore, Americans are consuming biased information in their online bubbles because their media is comfortable with fraudulent data.

A concrete example of what happens whenUS economic data becomes unreliable is employment numbers. At the end of 2025, the government couldn't produce any data because of the government shutdown. Most quants and analysts utilized ADP numbers instead. A few years ago, the ADP payroll numbers and the projections by the government were perceived as aligned. This is no longer the case, and most traders rely more on ADP indicators for things like the unemployment rate.

Speculating on what other data is fraudulent, I suspect that real Gross Domestic Product (GDP) will become meaningless. It was supposed to be an indicator for economic wellbeing but now best describes wealth inequality. Nominal GDP is a slightly better measure because it adjusts for things like inflation but it's based on government produced data.

Lastly, there is widespread fraud in climate data in order to deny climate change. The data feeds into economic models and affects property values and insurance rates. I have personally received gag orders from government agencies from both the US and Europe for publishing environmental data.

The reported economic data has been squirrelly for many years.

For instance, the employment report (establishment survey) has an error rate or +/- 122,000 with 90% confidence--completely swamping the actual value.

It be like I said I was 2m tall on my dating profile and one date is frightened off by my being -0.2m tall and another by me being 4m tall.

https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm#

I feel like we're dancing on the razor's edge.

On the one hand: high inflation, tariffs, layoffs, unemployment, high interest rate, energy crisis. Tons of economic red flags flashing.

On the other hand: AI is showing signs of being the next industrial revolution, we're re-industrializing, onshoring/friendshoring, and have a clear lead on chips and space tech at a time when it matters the most.

It's absolutely insane that Claude Code can spit out a week's worth of business automation tasks in half a day. And do it at relatively high quality in low-defect rate languages like Rust.

Europe won't be able to catch that. They're too busy regulating ahead of the tech. They're going to be a decade behind if they keep it up.

If we cut the chip supply right as things take off, China might not either. In a runaway takeoff scenario, they replace all their factory workers with robots and quickly scale and cost optimize. If America is smart, we might be able to do that too.

Our growth could accelerate or crater. These are wild times. More exciting than the last 20.

America needs to start pumping out new energy projects. It needs to make friends with all of its former allies. And it needs to import PhD students.

And we do need factories and raw inputs. The robots will take over for humans within a decade. If we stick the landing, we could be the new China right here at home.

Edit: rate limited on replies, so updating my comment instead.

Edit 2: Europe supplies the EUV lithography, but intelligence manifests higher up the stack. If we're talking rate limits, lots of countries supply critical inputs. I'm saying that Europe hasn't made strides towards developing their own models and infra, and it doesn't look like it's even close to starting to attack this problem. I want it to.

Edit 3: What I'm saying is that these tailwinds might put America back into the position it was in post-WWII. Manufacturing, tech, and science powerhouse in all the places that matter. Peers a generation or two behind. That's literally where America was after the war, and it looks like we could be teeing up for a repeat if it all doesn't unravel first.

America needs to double down on investing in energy and factories now. It looks like it will pay off in a big way.

Edit 4:

> You think Europe won't be able to use Claude Code

I would be extremely geopolitically anxious to rely on another country's tech in a take off scenario. Those tokens might be diverted to US businesses and factories. Or the US might strong arm concessions out of Europe. Europe needs domestic capability for this now.

It's not just Europe and sovereign nations. Workers and labor capital will be effectively frozen out of participation if there aren't open source equivalents.

> This is an downright evil take on the current situation.

It's just reality. Multipolarity means we're going to see a lot more of this type of framing, because it's what's happening on the ground.

It's what we regularly accuse China of, right?

While we're on the topic, why is it that we love to point the finger at other countries' corruption and we completely ignore the very obvious, rampant corruption in our own government? And I mean on both sides - Democrat and Republican. Insider trading, revolving door policies, etc. That's not even mentioning why we have people like Luigi Mangione. That's a whole separate elephant in the room.

> The integrity of U.S. statistical data is under threat from shrinking agency budgets, low response rates to government surveys, and political interference.

Just as both "sides" are upset about gerrymandering, yet neither "side" makes any proposal for an apolitical fair approach for redistricting...

So too with this debate. Haven't we heard the exact same arguments made, by the other "side"? I thought we weren't supposed to have flaming political bait on HN?

The solution to all of these problems is at hand, and we are the ones to build it. Let's just build.

Its been unreliable my entire life. Every year the economy gets better but life gets worse. You can't even recognize the country any more.

You can tell just from recent TikToks that the price inflation at the grocery stores is being fudged. Many items have 75-100+% price inflation from just a year ago.

Sorry, did I miss the period when economic data was reliable?

EDIT:

- GDP is a construct

- CPI has been overhauled many times

- Unemployment has always been politicized wrt what to count

- Trade data misses entire segments ie services, transfer pricing, digital

- Job creation is a black box

- The Fed

- The lag between monetary/fiscal/trade/regulatory policy

Thankfully, we can totally trust noneconomic data like the census. No biases, design artifacts or legislative meddling there.

Edit: noneconomic not none comic.

Two things come to mind:

- Whatever you measure gets optimized.

- When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

I have no idea which is more relevant here. Looking at the first one, my whole life people have been complaining that the measures that get touted in political discourse don't reflect quality of life. So if we stop looking at those as measures because they cease to be reliable, maybe they stop getting myopically optimized and we can get less myopic about what we prioritize in aggregate.

But looking at the second one, I've also wondered whether those measures really do reflect typical quality of life, and it's just that the people doing worse than typical will always see the measure as the wrong measure. So then we'd be losing the ability to prioritize actually useful things.

In my heart though, I kinda lean towards the first one. I've been in enough orgs where "the dashboard goes up" is incentivized to the detriment of the unmeasurable things that actually matter to the org.