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Why the bias towards official figures? In other words, for other countries where unofficial figures are better than official ones, why not use those? Why do t

• wslh 15y ago
  Answering in this context: because Argentina had a good statistics institute that was destroyed by three governments. So now you are paying people for lying in your face. And speaking generically not all countries have a private sector that can afford country wide statistics research.
  • aortega 15y ago
    It was not destroyed. Some clever guy realized that people automatically trust statistics and you can fake them. Locally, INDEC lost all credibility years ago. The Economist just realized it, next time they will realize the "big mac" index is also totally useless here. Meanwhile people are having 25% raises in dollars every year, meaning that temporally we have a lot of money, until all business go broke, that is.
    • RobertKohr 15y ago
      I don't know, the big mac index does a fairly good job at being an independent measure of inflation (and by a company that isn't trying to manipulate the price to hide inflation). Big mac's goal is to measure currency exchange rates, which I think is a little wonky since county to country a big mac doesn't work out so well, and I wish the used it to focus more on inflation.
    • arjunnarayan 15y ago
      Oh that was reported on 3 months ago by the New York Times: http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-mac-attack/ http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/24/argentinas-big-...