Are the occupational projections data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics flawed?
What do you mean by “flawed”? If you mean “inherently unreliable to the point of being useless,” then no, they probably aren’t. But if you mean “highly questionable but nonetheless the best estimates we’ve got,” then yeah, that’s about right. Look, for starters, these things are based on economic models, and the last six months have proven that all attempts at modeling the economy are pretty, umm, I think “lacking in rigor” might be a good way of putting it. Essentially, they involve: “[P]eople arbitrarily, or as a matter of taste, assigning numerical values to non-numerical things. And then pretending that they haven’t just made the numbers up, which they have. Economics is like astrology in that sense, except that economics serves to justify the current power structure, and so it has a lot of fervent believers among the powerful.” So basically, they’re bullshit. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t also useful. The BLS, unlike many economic observers, actually has a lot of data, and the
Point taken, valkyryn. Thanks for your thoughtful response. By “flawed,” I think I meant that I was wondering how useful their projections data actually is in regards to painting a picture that says, “Well, it looks like there will be more employment available for aeronautical engineers rather than lawyers,” and it makes me wonder what all of their assumptions were or if they ever adjust their models based on current information (such as robots making factory workers redundant, etc.).
Check this page for a slightly more detailed discussion of their methodology. Basically, they’re just extrapolating from current conditions. Some of those conditions are rather straightforward, e.g. how many aeronautical engineers are there this year and how many were there two years ago, etc., but some involve significant generalizations and economic models which are questionable for the reasons I outlined above, e.g. aggregate demand and GDP calculations. The claims for the projections seem to be pretty modest, which is good. The numbers they collect on how many people are employed in each sector are about as reliable as they’re likely to get, and again, I don’t know of any significant reason to doubt them. From there, it shouldn’t be all that hard to tell which sectors are going to be bigger than others two years from now, given that changes aren’t likely to be particularly dramatic over such a short timeframe. But as to what al
