**UPDATE @ 11 a.m. ET: In his op-ed published this morning, Harold Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a former FCC Commissioner, pointed out how the “narrowly focused” data cited by the recent WSJ article fails to accurately reflect the larger U.S. wireless ecosystem.**
I’ve been tracking the U.S. wireless industry for years. A couple of weeks ago, I noted in a blog post some of the reasons why the Bureau of Labor Statistics and CTIA have come to different conclusions about employment in the wireless industry.
Here’s a blog post by Michael Mandel, Chief Economic Strategist at the Progressive Policy Institute, who provides an in-depth exploration of why the BLS data is easily subject to misinterpretation – and why it only captures part of wireless carriers’ employment.
I encourage you to take a few minutes to read his thoughtful and thorough blog post explanation. Here’s his quick summation on how the error happened.
Unfortunately, the reporters and editors at the WSJ fell into the same trap that has ensnared many other journalists, policymakers, and even economists. They looked at the label on a piece of official economic data, and assumed that they understood it. But as we saw during the financial crisis and subsequently, government economic data can all too easily be misinterpreted.
