Zachary Karabell, founder of the Progress Network, notes that the personal attacks on EJ Antoni (including Karabell’s own gratuitous swipes) shouldn’t deflect from the basic reality that EJ is right that BLS data need an overhaul:

Antoni is not entirely wrong. In fact, he is largely correct, at least insofar as the way that the BLS collects data and the way it tries to gauge the unemployment rate is woefully archaic, increasingly problematic, and long overdue for an overhaul.

It is more than ever the case that we must ask the basic question: “If Trump or his partisans say it, does that mean it’s not true?” In the case of the flaws in our macroeconomic data, the answer is unequivocally that our data is flawed, our methods out of date, and the entire question of what we are trying to measure needs to be revisited.