Earlier quoted context omitted.
How exactly were they inflated?
The monthly employment numbers the BLS publishes are basically nonsense and I'm sure they wouldn't publish them if Congress didn't force them to. At the middle of every month, they run a survey asking ~120,000 businesses how many employees they had as of the 12th of the month. It takes 8 weeks for all the responses to the survey to come in, but the initial monthly numbers are based off of the first 2 weeks of respons…
You can have non-biased indicators that have error with mean 0.
Maybe a better question, when judging current operations, is how precise the biased estimates are becoming overtime. Is the size of the error increasing or decreasing.