On March 9, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) announced that 227,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs were created by the economy during February. Is the government’s claim true? No. Statistician John Williams reports that 44,000 of these jobs, or 19 percent, consist of an add-on factor derived from the BLS’s estimate that 44,000 more unreported jobs from new business start-ups were created than were lost by unreported business failures. The BLS’s estimate comes from the bureau’s “birth-death model,” which works better during normal times but delivers erroneous results during troubled times such as the economy has been experiencing during the...