Below is the number of initial filings for unemployment insurance.
How is this statistically possible?
Five of the last six weeks, the exact same number.
Effectively the same number in the last 11 weeks, except for the holiday weeks (President's Day and Easter).
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Consider
The US is a $28 trillion economy. It has 160 million workers.
Initial claims for unemployment insurance are state programs, with 50 state rules, hundreds of offices, and 50 websites to file. Weather, seasonality, holidays, and economic vibrations drive the number of people filing claims from week to week.
Yet this measure is so stable that it does not vary by even 1,000 applications a week.
Just the number of applications incorrectly filed out every week should cause it to vary more than this.