Explaining The Downward Jobs Revision

Imagine getting all A’s this year, then later your teacher says, “Haha, just kidding, actually you only got two A’s.” That’s kind of what happened with U.S. job numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) just announced that the economy added way fewer jobs than we thought over the last year, so many that they had to rewrite what “job growth” looked like. Grab your calculators and your “Wait what?!” faces, because this is big.

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Here are Five Fast Facts about the massive drop in job numbers:

1. 🤯 Job Count Cut - The U.S. added 911,000 fewer jobs over the year ending March 2025 than previously reported. It’s the biggest downward revision ever. 😣

2. 🏆 Record-Breaker In Revisions - This drop beats last year’s big correction (which was 818,000) and even beats older revisions back to 2003. This is history-class revision territory.

3. 👉 Blame The Little Guys - New small businesses are hard to track in monthly surveys. The model used by BLS (the “birth-death model”) tries to guess how many new businesses start and die each month. Turns out, they were way, way wrong.

4. 💵 Getting Worse - Because more people started businesses during/after the pandemic, the old guesses about how many fail vs how many succeed were thrown off. It made the job estimates too optimistic.

5. 👀 Economy Looks Weaker Now - With almost a million jobs “vanishing” from the record, the picture of U.S. job growth is less “super engine roaring” and more “quiet engine coughing.” People who study labor markets are saying: whoa.

🔥Bottom line: Some say the U.S. job numbers weren’t lying on purpose, but you can make your own decision on that one (it is, after all, quite the trend through the last couple of years). At best, they were overly optimistic thanks to old assumptions about how many businesses pop up (and stay alive). The story now is that job growth is smaller than we thought, but at least we have a more honest accounting of things. It’s like realizing your LEGO set is missing half the pieces - you can still build something, just maybe not what you first imagined.

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