>I recognize that you worry about the stats, but a lot of your arguments are
>based on some reliability in those statistics, so you can "a-hah" the folks
>who make more than you.
Actually, I got into studying the stats to make sense of the world, and to ah-hah all the naive leftists who would dilate exuberantly without much empirical grounding. I was initially very impressed with the way Baran & Sweezy used economic numbers in Monopoly Capital, and backwards to Marx, who used what he had in Capital.
> If there is a hole of absolute ambiguity in the
>stats,
What's your point here? Social statistics are inherently flawed? American social statistics are particularly flawed? The Real is That about which we can say nothing? In all the thousands of words you've generated on this topic, I can't really find a paraphrasable point.
> it means that we have to depend more on qualitative empirical
>studies-- inherently "softer"-- to talk about the economy, which doesn't
>play as well to your style.
If you mean that my style isn't to dilate exuberantly without much empirical grounding, that's true.
What exactly is this "softer" argument you're trying to make? The picture I see in the labor market stats is a very weak recovery, with slack demand for labor and falling real wages, with GDP growth coming from increased exploitation, and with capital gaining almost all the benefits of that growth. The balance of class forces at this point in the cycle is heavily tilted towards K and away from L. Does your softer brand of analysis differ?
> Which is fine, but you do have a
>methodological/stylistic attachment to claiming some ultimate truth value
>to the statisticians, even as you may debunk the more careless purveyors of
>them. But if they aren't "true", you can't debunk. So you do sort of
>want them to have gospel truth at their heart.
I don't want them to have gospel truth. I don't believe in gospel truth. From very careful study, though, I've concluded that the official statisticians of this U.S. do a pretty good job collecting and disseminating social statistics of all kinds, and radicals should be very grateful for this rich trove of information about the society we live in. Ignore them, and you risk turning into Stanley Aronowitz, or a left version of John Crudele.
Doug