May I recommend?

By now you've probably have heard that yesterday's job report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed job creation in July was far less than expected. Even more remarkable was the extremely large downward revision of the May and June numbers (revisions are common, but this one was very large), which removed a whopping 258,000 jobs from those two months. In all, it was a gloomy indication that the labor market is much weaker than we'd thought, which is consistent with other indications of a weakening economy. For example, GDP growth is running about a point lower than the past couple of years.

You've probably also heard that Trump fired the BLS commissioner because he was unhappy with the report. Fire the messenger. This is banana republic stuff. Tin-hat dictator stuff. Trump said the numbers were fake, rigged, etc., to make him look bad. Sure they were.

As it happens, I wrote a piece in 2019 that discussed an unexpectedly strong jobs report during Trump's first term. I explained back then that any conspiratorial notion that the numbers were cooked to make Trump look good was nonsense. I explained at length that whereas the ideological right reliably descends into irrational conspiracy theories, the ideological left has a far healthier view of reality. In particular, the left implicitly accepts that the BLS job statistics are an objective assessment produced and reported by competent career professionals who do their work with integrity, and that any attempt to falsify the numbers would utterly fail and be exposed.

The piece is extremely relevant to what's happening now, and I highly recommend that you read it. And it's a pretty good read, if I do say so myself. Among other concerns about good governance and such, the core and most important point is how we discern fundamental reality. And make no mistake: The left and right discern reality very differently.

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