HaroldWilson
1mo ago
The data, though adjusted, still does not bear out Trump's ludicrous rhetoric. All that's happened is that a very small decrease has been turned into a very small increase, before we even consider the question of the transitionary statistics of 2021. Even under these new figures rhetoric like the below is totally wrong.
"As we gather today, American cities, suburbs and towns are totally under siege. Kamala Harris and the communist left have unleashed a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death upon our land,"
"Bureaucratic" doesn't mean consistent and stable, it means arbitrary and unimaginative. You need to calculate how much inflation went up last year. The price of a Honda Civic went up $1000. The price of a Chevy went up $2000. Are those cars in the same categories, or different categories? Do we average them? Then it turns out that although the Civic went up $1000, they added new airbags that promise to save lives. How much is that worth? Let's make up a number. The cost went up by X but the value went up by Y so really that price increase doesn't represent $1,500 of inflation but etc. etc. etc. The economy is endlessly complex, and the measures aren't. So they're very somewhat arbitrary. It's drawing in freehand.
You don't need to posit invented scenarios like this, you can just go and check what they change.
For instance, in the UK they publish the change in CPI weights every year, which can be found here https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/inflationandpriceindices/datasets/consumerpriceinflationupdatingweightsannexatablesw1tow3.
The changes are seriously miniscule, with one or two exceptions due to the recovery of things like pubs and restaurants post-covid, but even these changes are not large.
What's particularly notable is that the Eurozone, US and UK all had extremely similar patterns of inflation since 2010, even in periods where it wasn't a notable partisan issue. Presumably all the administrators in each of these countries or blocs cannot have had identical internal or political incentives across time, nor does it seem likely they mere happen to have made identical mistakes in the exact same sequence. The only answer is that they are broadly measuring something real across the global economy in at least a relatively accurate way. No doubt disputes and decisions over changing weights can impact figures at the margin, but the overall pattern is generally going to be reliable.
the economy is great for some Americans and terrible for others
This is the entire purpose of national economic statistics - to provide an overall average for the entire economy.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
I'm not sure how coherent this is. If your objections are primarily socio-cultural - i.e. women would be happier in the home (I disagree but whatever, fine) - then why even bother talking about economics? If your objections are economic then these two goals obviously work at cross-purposes; if the problem is the increasing ratio of the non-economically productive to the productive, women leaving the workforce obviously makes this problem worse.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
And the media reports on U3 but not on the things that matter more.
@sarker has addressed most of the rest, but just to highlight this point - this is a criticism of the media not of the statistics. FRED or the Treasury or any other statistical body/publisher have very limited control over how the media reports on their statistics, so it's hardly their fault if you think some other measure of unemployment than U3 ought to be more widely reported on.
reflects short-term fluctuations in the labor market
This is more a criticism of news-as-events than anything specific to statistics. I don't wholly disagree with that broader point - news media does often privilege 'current events' over longer-term analysis - but reporting on unemployment is usually carried out with reference to current transitory conditions, which certainly has a legitimate place and for which U3 is the appropriate tool. In other words, that U3 reporting reflects short term fluctuations is by design.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Then we get to "unemployment". It's super fake. The male, prime age employment rate was nearly 95% in 1968. Today, it is just 86%. That's 9% of men age 25-54 who are not employed. But they are not counted as "unemployed" either. It's all fugazi.
Without wishing to be flippant, statistics measure what they measure, and it's absurd to get annoyed because a statistic designed to measure something (i.e. unemployment among people in the workforce) measures that thing, and not something else you think is actually more important. It's not 'fugazi', no-one is trying to pull the wool over your eyes - in fact you prove this very point - if you want you can look at other statistics - LFPR, U-6 Unemployment, whatever you like. Is your objection to the whole concept of U3 unemployment as a statistic. Should we not collect such data because you prefer U6? Seems a bizarre way of interacting with the world.
Do some people not understand the distinctions when a big headline reads 'unemployment at X%'? No doubt, but that is a problem with media literacy not with the statistics.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
If the numbers do mean something, then all the news corporations that said "Trump was wrong" should now be printing stories saying "sorry, turns out Trump was right."
Not necessarily. In fact, because the revisions are so small the numbers mean pretty much exactly what they did before - and if they do mean anything, what they probably mean is 'crime didn't deviate from it's previous trajectory a great deal'. Of course, this in turn doesn't necessarily imply any conclusion about the impact of BLM/changes to police policy, as who knows, without it maybe crime would have gone down by some non-trivial amount. News media should report on the change, but it shouldn't change their conclusions about anything. Trump saying 'crime is only going up' is still not really a statement that can be justified by the statistics in all but the most trivial sense. Even post-revision the 2022 figures were similar to the 2021 and 2020 figures (notwithstanding the problems with the 2021 statistics). While some of the fact-checking on Republican rhetoric on crime was probably over-zealous, that rhetoric was still wildly misleading. There was no surge in crime as constantly espoused by Republicans. Anyone saying 'crime is plummeting' was lying too (even if the pre-revision stats had turned out to be correct), but I don't think anyone was following that line as prominently or as vociferously as Republicans pursued the reverse narrative.
Stuff like this;
"As we gather today, American cities, suburbs and towns are totally under siege. Kamala Harris and the communist left have unleashed a brutal plague of bloodshed, crime, chaos, misery and death upon our land,"
is still utterly false. In fact 2023 crime is back down below 2019 levels. This proves nothing either because the margins are so fine. But Trump is and was wrong.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
A CRT TV maybe not, but you could certainly buy an outdated and small normal TV for incredibly cheap.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
I remember other discussions on this forum. Inflation and unemployment data. Long arguments about not trusting the economic data. This is why. These figures are totally arbitrary. There is no neutral competent adults-in-the-room authority anymore. Everything is this bad.
This is just intellectual cowardice. Ignoring for a second that this particular controversy is a total nothingburger (see my reply to @gattsuru), statistics which are in some sense 'constructed' are the only way of understanding any large scale and complex societal phenomena, whether it be crime, inflation or whatever else, and the solution if you don't trust the people constructing them is to investigate the particular processes by which any particular one is constructed to see what flaws there are/might be, whether they be minor or totally disqualifying. Otherwise, there is simply no point discussing anything.
Says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they have basically no basis to reality
Congratulations, this is an observation every undergraduate social scientist and humanities students has about 6 weeks into their studies - in the same sense this is true, history books also have no 'basis to reality' - they are necessarily vast abstractions and simplifications of an infinite amount of possible evidence. Like E.H. Carr says, evidence is like fish in the sea, not in fish on the fishmonger's block, and we are all groping around in the dark in the face of impossibly vast and complex problems of social measurement. However, we don't on that basis dismiss history as a worthless enterprise with no truth value, and nor should it be with statistics. If you find the FBI or the Treasury's statistical work inadequate or too easily manipulable, please don't ever read quantitative history, you might have a heart attack.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Lott's blog post raises more questions than it answers. At first, I had no idea where he gets his headline claim that 1,699 murders were 'missed'. In the spreadsheets he himself links, the old data shows 21,156 murders for 2022, and the new data 21,781, and the rates are in fact identical (at least to one decimal place). The difference in total violent crime doesn't match his headline estimate either.
On further inspection, what he's actually done is added together the revisions from 2021 and 2022 irrespective of whether the revisions were up or down. So since the FBI has revised their 2021 homicide estimates down slightly and their 2022 estimates up slightly he's added the changes up and got his figure of 1,699. However, this means his headline that the FBI 'missed 1,699 homicides in 2022' is flatly wrong in any reasonable reading. It's such a bizarre way of reaching that number it's hard not to chalk it up to a deliberate attempt to make the change seem bigger than it actually was.
If we take the blinkers off for a second, these revisions are really not that meaningful. All that's happened is that a very small decrease has been turned into a very small increase - politically this may be important insofar as appearing to be moving in the right direction is useful, but in reality it's just meaningless noise. The old figure of 377.1 total violent crimes per 100,000 has been replaced with a figure of 377.6, a 0.13% difference. Utter nothingburger that should not change anyone's opinion on anything.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
who had to have the rest of the party candidates drop out
I never understand this line. Is the idea that all of the moderate candidates were just going to keep splitting the vote right up until the convention, and then just, idk, let Bernie have it on a plurality or something? The dynamics of primaries demand that candidates drop out to endorse similarly positioned frontrunners. Do you think it's just a coincidence the 2016 and 2008 Democratic primaries also become two-horse races?
and couldn't manage to get anyone to show up when he did'
'Enthusiasm' is overrated. For every Obama or Trump there is a Starmer or Scholz who coasts by on the incompetence or divisiveness of their opponent - that is definitely not unique to Biden. Similarly;
secretly such a charismatic candidate that he shattered voting results
The obvious explanation is negative polarisation - maybe Biden didn't drive huge turnout himself, but it's very plausible to Trump did both for and against him.
I am also to simply ignore Georgia closing up polling stations due to a water main bursting, sending observers home, then dumping votes that went 100% for Biden that were totally already counted before Republican observers were given the boot, nothing to see here, it's honestly disturbing you'd even think to question such a thing, really. I am to simply take in stride that observers were kicked out, and windows blocked from outside observation, totall normal, totally legit, only a loony would think there might even be the barest scintilla of a possibility that something untoward was going on.
This is just nonsense. The water main 'bursting' happened a 6 a.m. on the morning of election day, disrupting things for a few hours, way before any shift towards Biden was beginning to be observed. There was no big tranche for Biden co-incident with the water problem. The whole kicking out observers thing I have only ever seen reported third-hand by people like Giuliani - the Chief Investigator of the SOS's offices has testified that this never occurred, no doubt you don't trust her but I'm curious what in particular convinces you this did happen.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
they would continue to unboundedly increase into the future
Yes? There is nothing wrong with this.
a loaf of bread is a million dollars
Well 'eventually' there would be nothing wrong with that - though it might takes many centuries. While targets like 2% are slightly arbitrary, some (low) level of inflation is necessary unless we want stagnation and unemployment.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
This line of thought is actually highly atypical. Even in 2022/2023 iirc a majority of Americans rated their own economic circumstances as good/improving, they just thought the country as a whole wasn't.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
we have all these factories lying around, we should turn them on, we should make Detroit wealthy again, we should make San Francisco a paradise again, we should Make America Great Again, and going further than that we should Make America Greater Than Ever Before. He just did it casually, because he wanted to help his country, when he was full of success and worldly things.
In what sense did he actually achieve - or even try to achieve - any of this?
There was minimal change in the trajectory of the manufacturing sector under Trump - there was a period of reasonable growth about the same as periods of growth under Obama in length and magnitude, stagnating in early 2019 before Covid made the numbers meaningless - and even after Covid corrections Biden also had a similar period of growth - slightly shorter but slightly faster - before stagnating similarly to Trump. What policy of Trump's was even supposed to achieve this? Tariffs is the only obvious candidate, but they came only in fits and starts and provoked a wide range of retaliatory tariffs. It doesn't matter though because clearly it didn't affect much either way.
If the answer to all this is that he wanted to achieve more but was thwarted by Congress/the Judiciary/Democrats/Republicans/the Deep State, then sorry but that's politics, maybe he isn't very good at it. Everyone agrees when Freddie De Boer says this to the left, but it's equally true for the right.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Trust The Experts
'Trust the Experts' is usually said in relation to descriptive statements, not normative ones. So you should 'trust the experts' to work out whether and by how much affirmative actions improves minority economic outcomes/affects levels of competence in an organisation, but that doesn't imply any particular position on affirmative actions.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
claiming that he was bad at his job
Grant considered him, if not actually 'bad', then at the very least highly overrated.
“Lee was of a slow, conservative nature, without imagination or humor, always the same, with grave dignity. I never could see in his achievements what justified his reputation. The illusion that nothing but heavy odds beat him will not stand the ultimate light of history.”
Which seems fair enough given that he made certain the Confederacy's destruction at Antietam and Gettysburg. After all one has to fight the war in front of one, not the one you would like to be fighting.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Except you can click on all these people and see that they are all amply qualified and experienced.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
They all seem pretty qualified. Just looking at the first one;
Ms. Criswell began her career in emergency management in Aurora, Colorado, where she led strategic change in the city's emergency and disaster planning. During her tenure, Ms. Criswell coordinated transitional housing and family reunification efforts in response to receiving evacuees during the response to Hurricane Katrina. She previously served at FEMA as the leader of one of the Agency's National Incident Management Assistance Teams (IMAT) and as a Federal Coordinating Officer. In this role, Ms. Criswell was the primary Federal representative responsible for leading the agency's response to and recovery from emergencies and major disasters, from severe flooding in North Dakota to hurricanes in South Carolina to fires in Colorado. She also spent two years as an executive in the private sector, providing exceptional technical expertise and the experience necessary to help her clients achieve their critical missions.
Ms. Criswell also proudly served 21 years in the Colorado Air National Guard. She is a veteran of two overseas tours to include as a fire officer in Kuwait immediately following the attacks of September 11, 2001, and to Qatar in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in 2010 where she advised senior leadership on fire protection requirements for new and existing military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Ms. Criswell holds a Bachelor of Science from Colorado State University, a Master of Public Administration from the University of Colorado – Denver, and a Master of Arts in Security Studies from the Naval Postgraduate School, Center for Homeland Defense and Security.
Seems like the exact experience you would expect for someone in such a role? She was also Commissioner of the NY Emergency Management Dept.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
He’s using it not as a legal term but as a meta description
That's fine, but if he wants a meta-descriptor he should be probably not use one containing a word which is strictly false in relation to the group he is trying to describe.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
This just seems a classic case of export finance? As part of the agreement, the article you link in the post states, Siemens will be doing a lot of work on the project, which explains everything. Most governments do this quite a lot as an inexpensive way of boosting exports and fostering good relations abroad - India does it too! Total nothingburger.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
I consider it a valid business reason to withdraw from the market.
This is still one step removed from the 'real' business reason though. The NLRB alleged that Starbucks' closure were part of a strategy of intimidation, not simply a response to business conditions downstream of unionisation. Which is to say, they didn't close the stores because unionization made labor too expensive and reduced profitability, rather they closed viable locations as mere retaliation/pour encourager les autres.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
I cannot understand what value is created for society when a defense attorney concocts elaborate arguments and exploits loopholes in order to stop somebody from being punished for something that person did.
Because, obviously, the very act of the attorney defending them in front of the judge and/or jury is the process by which we arrive at a conclusion of whether that person did in fact do it in the first place. We can be more confident in knowing that someone did do something precisely because someone has done their very best to defend them, and if the defense attorney can't furnish any convincing arguments there probably aren't any. How are we supposed to determine what arguments will be 'elaborate' or 'loopholes' and which will not be in advance of the arguments actually being made to someone?
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
What is there to argue about? Why is a defense attorney necessary? What do we gain by pretending that going through the (expensive, time-consuming) motions is valuable?
How do we determine which among every criminal charge meets the bar for sufficient evidence not to have to undertake a formal adversarial trial? Should every charge have a pre-trial in which it is decided which kind of trial is required? Who would have the final say in such a pre-trial? Would it itself be adversarial?
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
Bizarre comment. Is the suggestion that defense attorneys should make their own ad-hoc judgements about who they think is or isn't innocent and put more or less effort into their defense accordingly?
HaroldWilson
2mo ago
A triumph for the substance-free politics of vague cultural signalling, unfortunately. Harris still supports the centrepieces of the Democratic pro-labor agenda such as the PRO Act, but because she doesn't give the right cultural signals a portion of the membership turns on her. Ridiculous.
Not true at all. The statistics have barely changed and one's conclusions should be exactly the same - a very small decrease moving to a very small increase is not important.
I'm just asking you to explain why it's bullshit, not just refuse to engage with any specifics.
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