Bloomberg surveyed 77 economists ahead of the August jobs report. Every single one of them undershot the number. Not by a little. By four standard deviations.
Seventy-seven credentialed professionals, and not one of them saw it coming.
The August jobs report landed at 162,000 new jobs — a number so far above the consensus forecast that National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett could barely contain himself on Fox News. "All 77 got the number wrong — and by a lot," Hassett said. "This number is four standard deviations above the average of their forecast."
For those who slept through statistics class, four standard deviations means the actual result was so far from the prediction that it would almost never happen if the models were right. The models weren't right. The economists weren't right. The entire professional forecasting class whiffed on a scale that Hassett called "one of the best numbers relative to expectations I've ever seen."
This wasn't a close miss where half the forecasters were a little high and the other half a little low. The miss was directional and unanimous. Every economist Bloomberg surveyed predicted fewer jobs than the economy actually produced. All 77 of them landed on the pessimistic side of reality.
Now, we've been told for months that Trump's economic policies — the tariffs, the regulatory rollback, the energy push — would crater the labor market. That was the expert consensus. That was the sophisticated take from people with PhDs and Bloomberg terminals and corner offices.
The economy didn't get the memo.
What makes this particular humiliation worth savoring isn't that economists were wrong. Economists are wrong all the time. It's the uniformity. When 77 people independently arrive at the same wrong answer, that's not an analytical failure. That's a herd. They weren't modeling the economy. They were modeling each other's assumptions.
This is the same credentialed class that told us inflation was transitory, that shutting down the economy for two years would have manageable consequences, and that printing trillions of dollars wouldn't affect prices at the grocery store. Their track record isn't a track record. It's a warning label.
Meanwhile, the actual labor market — the one where people get hired and paychecks clear — keeps churning under policies the experts assured us would be catastrophic. The factories Trump bet on are hiring. The energy sector he unleashed is expanding. The small businesses that got regulatory relief are adding staff.
The 77 economists surveyed by Bloomberg will be back next month with new predictions, new models, and new confidence. The jobs numbers will come in, and we'll see how that goes.
Maybe next time Bloomberg should survey 77 plumbers instead. At least when a plumber tells you something's about to blow, he's usually right.