For me, the most surreal aspect of the press’s credulous reporting on the unconstrained orgy of spending they insisted on calling the “stimulus package” was their reporting of “jobs impact.”\u00a0 The scare quotes and accompanying skepticism arise from the definition of “jobs impact” as “jobs created or saved,” an unverifiable notion specifically designed to eliminate any accountability for the numbers being offered.<\/p>\n
Nevertheless, those numbers were dutifully published.\u00a0 In the Houston Business Journal<\/a>,\u00a0 The Tennesean<\/a>, New Mexico news station KRQE<\/a>, etc., everyone reported the local number of “jobs created or saved” by the spending bill.\u00a0 CBS<\/a> regurgitated these spoon-fed numbers:<\/p>\n California…will see a “jobs impact” of 396,000.\u00a0 Texas (with 269,000 jobs predicted), New York (with 215,000 jobs predicted) and Florida (with 206,000 jobs predicted) also fare well.<\/p>\n Less populous states see far less impact: Alaska, North Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming are each only predicted to see a “jobs impact” of 8,000.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hmm, 8,000 each for the smaller states.\u00a0 What a coincidence.<\/p>\n I wonder if the CBS reporter noticed that each of those states had exactly one congressional district?\u00a0 Or that when you looked at each of the districts and states, as reported in the various local journals, “jobs impact” was consistently close to 8,000.\u00a0 So, if you liked arithmetic and wanted to know the number of jobs created by state, you could simply multiply the number of congressional districts in the state by 8,000.<\/p>\n So, let’s just flick on our brains here for a moment, and ask ourselves:\u00a0 What are the odds are that any given district will see a “jobs impact” of about 8,000?\u00a0 Statistically speaking, the standard deviation around the mean of 8,000 is probably in excess of, oh, 8,000.\u00a0 In other words, the district-by-district reporting is totally bogus<\/em>.\u00a0 Which makes the state-by-state estimates pretty bogus.<\/p>\n The inventors of the “jobs impact” numbers were looking at the total estimated jobs created from the whole bill and dividing by the number of districts to get their ludicrous district- and state-level results.<\/p>\n How bogus is the aggregate national number?\u00a0 Mark Zandi, economist to the star politicians, noted with typical humility:<\/p>\n Yes, there’s a high level of uncertainty. But my estimates are as good as you’re going to get, and they’re good enough to be useful in trying to evaluate whether we should do this or not.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n So, the answer is:\u00a0 bogus, all the way up, as well as down.\u00a0 It’s as if they passed a random bill for $535 million, and advertised that they were spending $1 million in every district across the land.<\/p>\n So, why did the press go for Obama’s uncannily even district and state “jobs” estimates?\u00a0 Why did they participate in conspiring to create an aura of precision that so obviously wasn’t justified?<\/p>\n