Promises to workers and suppliers deserve a firmer basis than a favorable monthly headline. On March 6, 2017, Census reported that January manufacturing new orders rose 1.2 percent to $470.2 billion, while the durable-goods backlog declined 0.4 percent to $1,114.1 billion. The contrast leaves room for hope about incoming business without establishing that a company's future obligations have become easier to honor. [jan17prel]

New orders are recorded net of cancellations; backlog is the stock of unfilled durable-goods orders at month-end. New and unfilled orders exclude semiconductors. These seasonally adjusted dollar values are not adjusted for inflation, and they do not measure how employers treated people. Nor does the backlog decline identify cancellations as its cause. Ethical judgments must not turn those statistical limits into accusations. [jan17prel]

Earlier evidence shows why candor about estimates belongs in any promise. The February 3 Census release reported December shipment growth of 2.2 percent; the March release revised that figure to 2.5 percent. Both come from one statistical program. Keeping the older estimate visible explains what changed, rather than presenting the later number as a separate confirmation that commitments are safe. [jan17prel][dec16prel]

From an interfaith and nonreligious ethical perspective, our question is how to make commitments responsibly under uncertainty, not which tradition owns the answer. A practical response is to distinguish firm promises from conditional plans and explain those conditions to the people relying on them. Restraint also has costs if it becomes an excuse to postpone every commitment. These reports cannot decide that balance for a workplace, and their nonprobability survey cannot supply sampling confidence intervals to remove the uncertainty. [jan17prel]

Source documents

  1. Manufacturers Shipments, Inventories and Orders, January 2017https://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/historical_data/pressreleases/prel/2017/jan17prel.pdf
  2. Manufacturers Shipments, Inventories and Orders, December 2016https://www.census.gov/manufacturing/m3/historical_data/pressreleases/prel/2016/dec16prel.pdf