Keeping the long view in mind

Employees on nonfarm payrolls by state, in thousands / Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Employees on nonfarm payrolls by state, in thousands / Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

In today’s mobile Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat world, statistics need to be instant and simple. But the real world is often more complex than that. Take, for example, the public perception of the local economy, as revealed in three recent statistical looks at the region.

The first two looks are based on Providence Business News surveying of local companies and their leaders, one known as the semi-annual Business Survey, the other from our weekly PBN.com poll.

In the first case, nearly 65 percent of business owners who responded expected Rhode Island’s economy to improve in the next 12 months (5.5 percent said it would get worse). That positivity stands in marked contrast to the pessimism expressed online, where 30 percent of PBN.com poll respondents said that the state’s economy would worsen over the next year.

Put those opinion snapshots against a more rigorous statistical look at the region that came out last week. The preliminary, not seasonally adjusted nonfarm payroll figures for the closest metropolitan regions as well as for the six New England states reveal that on average the month-to-month view yielded a much-less-positive view of the economy than did the year-over-year view.

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The Providence-Warwick metro area, for instance, showed a month-to-month gain of 0.12 percent, as 580,500 people showed up on payrolls in August. But the year-over-year change was a more robust 2.42 percent.

The Boston-Cambridge-Nashua metro, the entire region’s white-hot engine of growth, actually recorded a 0.32 percent drop in payroll figures from July to August, 2015. But growth from August of last year to this year clocked in at 2.73 percent.

The moral of this story? Step back and take in the bigger – and likely more accurate – picture. •

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