ASA Connect

While no less painful, there may be some parallels in the UK about the consequences of a "loss of confidence" in statistics from the ONS.

The UK statistician recently stepped down due to health reasons, the media mentions "crisis of confidence "

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The head of the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS), Sir Ian Diamond, has resigned with immediate effect due to health reasons, at a time when the ONS faces a crisis of confidence in its work.

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......Last month, a report from the Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) laid out its concerns about the quality of the ONS's data.

These concerns focused on, but were not limited to, the widely recognised problems with the Labour Force Survey which is used to measure the unemployment rate in the UK.

IN the UK The concerns were for the surveys used to measure unemployment. For those keeping track, when the "guy in the white house" fired the head of the BLS it was because of a downward revision. A challenge at the BLS is the response rate and timely response for the surveys of employment.

However, the Economist and Forbes magazine seems to be completely surprised by the US survey response rates and the "released in a hurry"

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"Trillions of dollars in global assets reprice within moments of a BLS release," The Economist wrote last week. "It is a puzzle why this month's revisions were unusually large."

It is also quite flawed. The initial estimate is released in a hurry each month - earlier than any other major metric - and it is always incomplete. The collection period is very short and typically one third of the desired inputs are missing from the first report. The BLS relies on survey procedures that are outdated, and response rates are dropping rapidly. In the most important poll, nearly 60% failed to respond. The initial estimate is revised at least four times over the following two years as further information trickles in, but the revisions are highly volatile and fail standard statistical tests for precision....