RE: Profit Rates -- From Michael Yates

["Eric Nilsson" <enilsson@xxxxxxxxx>]

Max wrote,

>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.

I generally agree with this claim.

One of the main problems with government statistics is that the users of
these statistics don't look at all the documentation generated by the
government to explain/justify what they do. This documentation often reveals
the great amount of thought that has gone into the most minor details of
many government-produced sets of data. This documentation goes FAR beyond
the quick-and-dirty justifications appearing in the official methodology
publications they issue (or instance, the BLS's Handbook of Methods gives
just a surface indication of the reason the BLS does what it does).

This documentation is often filled with explicit or implicit statements of
the weakness of the data. It is often not easy reading, but it is essential
reading for those who want to avoid misusing/misinterpreting the data.

Further, all data agencies continually reconsider how they do they generate
data. A paper trail of this rethinking exists in a vast number of published
and unpublished papers on the minute details of data creation.

At the same time, most government data implicitly or explicitly accepts
uncritically neoclassical economics. But having done this, the government
data producers take everything amazingly seriously. As a result, much
government data has some silly ideas embedded within it.

Eric
.