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It's relevant to note that even how inflation in the US calculates inflation is subject to regular change- and thus regular selection bias opportunities- as what is being compared changes over time.
Also relevant is how the selection of categories can be used to include- or exclude- relevant data to make certain category measurements more or less impressive for administration political purposes. Unemployment is a classic one, as the unemployment rate that gets fielded by political actors isn't actually the rate of unemployed adults in the population.
What's the alternative to changing the basket of goods as consumer's change their behaviour. Or should we still have a Marconi Wireless and pipe tobacco in the basket?
The unemployment thing doesn't matter as long as you compare like with like. The various unemployment numbers tend to track each other very closely.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1aPBr
Why do you think the answer to your question matters to the point the question is meant to rebut?
The lack of superior alternatives doesn't mean that current items are good. The answer can simply be 'they're both compromised.' There is no obligation- or even reason to expect- valid and bias-free data. It can all be unreliable.
(The alternative, by the way, is to execute but-for tracking so that people can see what the difference metrics would be but-for the substitutions. This means maintaining all models in parallel, with clearly delineated divergence points from old models and new models, such that models can be clearly monitored for divergence to catch points where substitution effects account for obvious differences in ratings. If you want to demonstrate that products are not simply being selected for more favorable comparisons, you must be able to compare it to what they diverged from.)
The point of the unemployment thing is that like isn't being compared to like.
Hence why the motte-claim is 'social unemployment is low!', and the bailey-caveat is 'if we ignore a lot of society.' Society, and society-bar-much-of-society, are not like things, even when they are purposely portrayed as such.
And this goes without various period changes to categorization counting that comes and go with administrations, at which point categorical definition differences are conflated with smuggled insinuations of continuity, which is a not-uncommon way for political actors to imply systemic changes when the primary change in a system is the measurment.
It is across time. If u-2 unemployment decreases, even if you think u-4 or u-6 should be the more relevant number, that still reflects an improvement in the economy.
Any specific evidence for this happening?
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Maybe this has already been thought up, and maybe it's already done but there should be multiple baskets of goods, and they get updated on a lag. With all baskets needing to be reconciled.
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