Data Paranoia Watch, Edition MMLXVI (seasonal adjustment)

A reader calls my attention to this article arguing that the large upside surprise in employment growth reported for January 2022 is due to seasonal adjustment. It takes 10 seconds to find the requisite not-seasonally-adjusted data on FRED, and another 10 seconds to load it into a decent software package as simple as Excel, and another 10 seconds (at most) to type in the command to take a 12 month log difference to see seasonal adjustment issues are not the reason for the big job growth number (there might very well be other reasons, but that ain’t it).

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