Re: re: profit rates

[sawicky@xxxxxxxxxx (Max Sawicky)]

I've worked with BEA people in the past.  A friend of mine in
Gov refers to them as "righteous technicians."  They are
resolutely without political bias in their work.  All of their
procedures are vetted by panels of outside experts.

Without doubt, you can spot all sorts of problems in
their work.  But I would be willing to bet that you would
not be able to arrive at a better way of doing it, given
the same resources and data that are available to them.
This is probably the best sausage you can get, given
the ingredients.

One of my own truisms about the Gov, based on my own
admittedly limited experience in it, is that however crazy
something may seem from the outside (with reference
to bureaucratic procedures), there is always a good
underlying reason for it, and equally good reasons for
not doing it some other way.  There is rationality at
the micro level, more often than not.  Irrationality
emerges at the macro level, or it is injected by
elected officials or their appointees.

mbs


> I would like to expand on what Daniel said.  The problem with the
> BEA accounting
> is that it presumes that depreciation follows a preset, regular pattern
> regardless of changing economic conditions.  In addition, the
> depreciation rates
> apply to broad ranges of capital goods.