in Austrian journals there is this econ guru from St. Gallen management school, Friedmund Malik, who, in a series of articles, makes one gloomy forecast for the US economy after the other. One of his recent pieces was about hedonic indexing, a device used by US statisticians which values goods not at their price, but at price times a factor that supposedly makes up for the value losses due to rapid innovation, most notably in computer equipment. Malik argues that hedonic indexing, although maybe statistically sound, is economically wrong, touching on the fraudulous, yet this is how US GDP and growth figures are calculated, all of which are thusly inflated.
Maybe some of the initiated want to comment on that?
cheers AN