[PEN-L:8057] Juggling Big Brother's Books

["Max B. Sawicky" <maxsaw@xxxxxxxxx>]

A few neglected points about this discussion on the veracity
of BLS data and associated political significance:

1.  If we acknowledge that The Suits want accurate data for
their own nefarious purposes, then it follows that somewhere
there is a secret BLS compiling accurate data, while the
phony BLS that we all know is equally busy concocting
phony data.   So now you know where those folks you
went to grad school with and never heard from again have
disappeared to.  Aha!
     Truth be told, it's hard enough and expensive enough to
do the data one way, let alone two.

2.   Data, even phony data a la the Boskin Commission,
often has multiple, politically contradictory implications.
The numbers are not as important as the stories they can
be used to tell, and those stories are not, as a rule, invented
at BLS or similar agencies (e.g., Census, BEA) but by those
working closely with politicians (OMB, CEA).

I pointed out an example in one of my previous, immortal
posts, regarding the CPI flap.  The CPI change promoted
by Boskin implies an enormous reduction in poverty over
the past thirty years, and if you wanted to tell the story,
a great victory for social policy.  In the very early 1980's,
there was relatively little discussion of long-term problems
in Social Security; all the rage was the alleged failure of
the War on Poverty.  Similarly, if the CPI is overstated,
then long-term there is no problem in Social Security,
not because of the lower benefit payments but because
of the implied increases in real wages.

Henwood is quite right that research on poverty has been
ignored in conservative welfare reform.  The President
even ignored the work of his own HHS on the topic,
prompting the uncelebrated hero Wendell Primus
(one of HHS's people in charge of such research) to
resign in protest.

I did my degree at the U of Md in College Park.  Although
we may be looked down upon by the Ivies and other
elite departments, we send a lot of people into the Federal
government, including all the best places to work.  I know
a lot of these folks, and the idea that they would sit around
concocting phony data is an utter absurdity.  You could
certainly criticize the way they may do one thing or another,
not to mention their basic methodologies and fundamental
views of the world, but those are different matters.


another matter
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Max B. Sawicky            Economic Policy Institute
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