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> You're seriously making the claim that the BLS has nobody with your intelligence in a powerful position? It has nothing to do with intelligence. And of cours

> You're seriously making the claim that the BLS has nobody with your intelligence in a powerful position? It has nothing to do with intelligence. And of course statisticians at BLS know that this is trash. Any economics or statistics student could do be a better job. And certainly, no statistician worth their salt would compute anything with the methodology that BLS uses. I cannot imagine a paper being published based on this methodology. It's not that reviewers would reject it, it's that no one in a position to submit such a paper would ever do so because of the shame associated with doing such shoddy work. I'm not sure I'm doing a good job of explaining how incredibly subpar this is. BLS has other priorities. Changing the methodology isn't easy at all. All of your old numbers don't make any sense anymore. You can't go back and recompute them. And people would fight over what methodology to use. Everything they do follows this insane totally outdated approach, it would be really confusing to have parts that are modern and parts that are ancient; perhaps even more confusing than the current mess. There are no incentives to change anything. Who will make them change something? Congress? They have a worksheet, they run it, they get numbers, garbage in/garbage out, people use the numbers regardless. Hardly anyone knows how these numbers are computed. Hardly anyone cares that they are unscientific trash. Pretty much everyone stops at the title associated with the number.

throw0101c 3y ago
> Any economics or statistics student could do be a better job. And certainly, no statistician worth their salt would compute anything with the methodology that BLS uses. So every bond trader, Fed observer, academic economist, investment bank economist, pension fund, union, etc, are all aware of this bad methodology in the BLS CPI, and are saying nothing? All these people with heaps of money on the line in one of the most looked-at statistics published are… ignoring the problem? > Hardly anyone knows how these numbers are computed. Hardly anyone cares that they are unscientific trash. Pretty much everyone stops at the title associated with the number. Really? Because MIT's Billion Prices Project (BPP; an index of internet prices, scraped daily) found the CPI and the BPP are very tightly intertwined: * http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project
- light_hue_1 3y ago
  > So every bond trader, Fed observer, academic economist, investment bank economist, pension fund, union, etc, are all aware of this bad methodology in the BLS CPI, and are saying nothing? All these people with heaps of money on the line in one of the most looked-at statistics published are… ignoring the problem? No, they make money off the problem by computing better numbers internally. And there are countless papers out there criticizing the BLS for their shoddy methodology. > Really? Because MIT's Billion Prices Project (BPP; an index of internet prices, scraped daily) found the CPI and the BPP are very tightly intertwined: Funny someone else brought that up. That's "true" as long as you don't look at any of the details and don't read their publications. They don't measure housing for one thing, and that's what we were talking about here. Only goods. They even show that services aren't well estimated at all. And even some categories of goods aren't. And they unfortunately ran at a time of historically low inflation. It's much easier to predict a number that is very low and has very small range. So.. the MIT project is about the wrong category of goods. Computed in a totally different way by the BLS. Nothing in my post applies to it. And they explicitly show that they don't agree with CPI on categories like it (simply because their project isn't relevant to them).

throw0101c 3y ago

> Any economics or statistics student could do be a better job. And certainly, no statistician worth their salt would compute anything with the methodology that BLS uses. So every bond trader, Fed observer, academic economist, investment bank economist, pension fund, union, etc, are all aware of this bad methodology in the BLS CPI, and are saying nothing? All these people with heaps of money on the line in one of the most looked-at statistics published are… ignoring the problem? > Hardly anyone knows how these numbers are computed. Hardly anyone cares that they are unscientific trash. Pretty much everyone stops at the title associated with the number. Really? Because MIT's Billion Prices Project (BPP; an index of internet prices, scraped daily) found the CPI and the BPP are very tightly intertwined: * http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/ * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Billion_Prices_project

light_hue_1 3y ago
> So every bond trader, Fed observer, academic economist, investment bank economist, pension fund, union, etc, are all aware of this bad methodology in the BLS CPI, and are saying nothing? All these people with heaps of money on the line in one of the most looked-at statistics published are… ignoring the problem? No, they make money off the problem by computing better numbers internally. And there are countless papers out there criticizing the BLS for their shoddy methodology. > Really? Because MIT's Billion Prices Project (BPP; an index of internet prices, scraped daily) found the CPI and the BPP are very tightly intertwined: Funny someone else brought that up. That's "true" as long as you don't look at any of the details and don't read their publications. They don't measure housing for one thing, and that's what we were talking about here. Only goods. They even show that services aren't well estimated at all. And even some categories of goods aren't. And they unfortunately ran at a time of historically low inflation. It's much easier to predict a number that is very low and has very small range. So.. the MIT project is about the wrong category of goods. Computed in a totally different way by the BLS. Nothing in my post applies to it. And they explicitly show that they don't agree with CPI on categories like it (simply because their project isn't relevant to them).