From Forbes
Forget BLS. Here’s How To Take The Economy’s Temperature Without Using Government Data
By Brandon Kochkodin
In 2025, trust in America's official economic data, like trust in so many institutions, is crumbling—not because the numbers have been proven false, but because President Trump has suddenly turned them into a political litmus test.
After a weak July jobs report, and a downward revision of May and June numbers, Trump pulled a “kill the messenger” move by firing Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, writing on Truth Social: “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
Economists of all stripes (including Trump’s own BLS Commissioner during his first term) insisted there was no evidence that McEntarfer was anything but a diligent and straight shooter. No matter. In her place, Trump has nominated E.J. Antoni, a Heritage Foundation economist, MAGA stalwart and BLS critic who once joked that “the ‘L’ is silent” in the agency’s acronym...
Joshua Blumenstock, the co-director of the Global Opportunity Lab and the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California at Berkeley, whose research leverages novel data to address economic challenges, says economists call this the Lucas Critique — when the system changes, the relationships you relied on in the past can break. Blumenstock gives the example of Google Flu Trends, a tool developed in 2008 by Google that tracked flu outbreaks by analyzing search data. It worked at first, but as search algorithms and media coverage changed, its predictions became unreliable, overshooting actual flu cases in 100 out of 108 weeks...
Joshua Blumenstock is an Assistant Professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. His research lies at the intersection of machine learning and empirical economics.
