RE: Profit Rates -- From Michael Yates

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

First of all, except from a few occasions, I have not dealt with
government agencies producing statistical information here in the
US. On the other hand, I have some friends who worked at The
State Planning Agency of Turkey, The Turkish State Statistics
Organization (my translations) and the like, and I know that they
are honest, smart and well educated people. This does not mean
however that all of those who worked there were honest, smart and
well educated people and I heard many horror stories from my
friends about many others.

One thing I suspect (and Eric and Jim verify) is that it should
be true also here in the US that these institutions are not
ideologically neutral institutions, whatever neutrality means in
this context. Further, since these institutions are bureaucratic
in the Weberian sense, as Rob reminds us, they are not conducting
independent scientific research. If my boss tells me that I
cannot not use a particular model or technique that would allow
me to arrive at a better way of doing my work, then I cannot do
it.

Here is another problem I know from my experience. Suppose you
are a scientist whose work relies on the work of others who are
performing (boring) tasks according to your specifications.
Suppose there are many of them working in parallel so you have no
hope of monitoring each of them individually. Unless the results
they produce look "unreasonable" according to your subjective
criteria, how would you know how reliable what you got from them
are?

Here is one more problem: there are too many data to deal with,
far too many!...

Sabri

--------- Original Message ----------
Eric wrote:
>> 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.
>