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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.
I have a friend who used to work at the Fed. He says to the extent that the figures weren't made up, they hsve basically no basis to reality. The numbers they report just reflect the process of the people creating them, which is bureaucratic and dull.
Yeah, a lot of government economic stats feel super fake.
For example, the rate of inflation depends on so-called "hedonic adjustments". I'll admit that this is a valid methodology. For example, a TV today is miles better than a TV from 2002. But, as I've written before, these hedonic adjustments DON'T take into account other things like the degradation in service quality. In 2002 the Starbucks bathroom wasn't locked. Today it is. Where's the hedonic adjustment for that?
When we remove hedonic adjustments, inflation is much, much higher than the official numbers. The official numbers also just don't pass the smell test.
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.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LREM25MAUSA156S
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Isn’t boring and dull bureaucratic number crunching the opposite of “made up”? I wouldn’t want these numbers influenced by someone putting their finger on the scale because they know better than the data. I’m sure it happens anyways, but I don’t see how your argument justifies what you’re claiming.
No, it means that they are "made up" out of the distortions and idiosyncracies of a horribly-kludged procedure on its 44th revision from an original 1987 typewritten spiral-bound handbook, which has been subject to a constant distortionary tug-of-war to drag it closer to the political expediency of the day, or the latest appointee's personal policy judgment.
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