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"Measured in constant dollars, America’s manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s." What's a 'constant dollar'? Is that no
by beoba 16y ago
"Measured in constant dollars, America’s manufacturing output today is more than double what it was in the early 1970s."
What's a 'constant dollar'? Is that nominal or inflation-adjusted? Over that timespan the two could mean very different things.
- nostrademons 16y ago"Constant dollars" = inflation-adjusted.
- joe_the_user 16y agoHowever that raises the larger question of whether these inflation-adjustments are accurate. See: http://www.shadowstats.com/article/primers_intro http://www.shadowstats.com/article/primers_intro
- nostrademons 16y agoYou can say that about any statistic. The purpose of statistics is to abstract away a large amount of raw data into a summary that people can understand at a glance. Of course it's going to throw away information - some of which might be important - in the process. But those errors are as likely to be on the upside as on the downside. I never would've guessed as a kid that I'd be able to take a phone with me anywhere, with 4G of storage, and a built-in GPS, and the collected information of humanity at my command, for a day's worth of wages for the phone and an hour per month for the service. The cost of a college education has skyrocketed far more quickly than inflation, but it's also never been easier to learn things yourself through the Internet and then demonstrate to potential employers that you've learned them. Health care is far more expensive in constant dollars than it was a generation ago, but that's largely because for many of the most expensive treatments today, the alternative back then was "Die".