April 30, 2025· 47 min

Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying

Bill Beach

Orality

Model

72%

Oral-dominant (speeches, podcasts, storytelling)

Speaker Breakdown

HostTracy Alloway(1,546 words)

M:94%

HostJoe Weisenthal(1,350 words)

M:28%

GuestBill Beach(5,033 words)

M:28%

Oral Indicators

Agonistic32%

literally, completely, obviously

Engagement67%

you, our, your

Memory Aids100%

listen, now, like

Repetition100%

know (69x), like (62x), about (61x)

Parallelism78%

And I'm Tracy Alloway...., But I've said this a bunch of ..., Or, like, the first Friday of ...

Sound Patterns61%

54 question(s), alliteration: "markets move", alliteration: "barclays brief"

Formulaic Phrases4%

you know what, i mean

Literate Indicators

Hedging8%

could, might, maybe

Passive Voice9%

is based, were created, be collected

Abstract Nouns19%

investment, recommendation, unemployment

Subordination8%

because, provided, though

Sentence Length35%

Avg: 13.8 words/sentence

Word Complexity48%

investment, analyze, anticipate

Academic Markers0%

Impersonal Style33%

600 personal pronouns found

Descriptive Style83%

literally, completely, really

Description

Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly. Read more: Houston, We Have a Data Problem The US Economy Is Fracturing Too Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlots See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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