A lot of us were curious, and said so at the time, when the September 2012 labor market report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a sudden drop in the unemployment rate from 8.1 percent to 7.8 percent. This purported improvement was based on the claim that the household survey showed an astonishing one-month increase of 873,000 jobs! This from an economy that was typically producing fewer than 200,000 new jobs a month - and has continued to do so ever since?
