----- Original Message ---- From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Monday, December 15, 2008 8:55:43 PM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Official Economic stats (was: Roubini)
indexes is really hard, conceptually and practically. My impression, from having talked to official geekdom for more than 20 years, is that they're dedicated public servants trying to do the best job they can with limited resources.
[WS:] Very true, however the devil is in the methodologies, not in conspiracies. That is, different methodologies can produce different stats and the choice between methodologies is often political.
Take for example the concept of the boundaries of production used in national accounting, which in principle consists of all market transactions. However, as feminist critiques of that concepts pointed out, it leaves out a substantial chunk of productive activities, namely those carried out within the household sector or by unpaid labor (the latter is a bit more complicated and depends on the instituional setting of that labor) - both done predominantly by women. So the national accounts statisticians who adhere to the 1993 SNA dutifuly perform their jobs as any good public servants would do, but the methodology they use undercounts certain types of productive activities, namely those performed by women. Another example - collection of the decennial census data methods, which rely on the place of residence to identify respondents, and thus undercount low income people who are more likely to lack a permanent address.
There is no conspiracy or "number cooking" involved here. In fact, alternative methods of accounting or census data collection haved been proposed by the same geeks who produce the official statistics - but they have not been adopted for the "official" use, usually for political reasons. However this political support of or opposition to certain methodologies is a part of the open political process, "business as usual" one may say, rather than some under the table conspiracy.
Wojtek