Independent
Thinks s/he gets paid by the post
- Joined
- Oct 28, 2006
- Messages
- 4,629
The guy at shadow statistics is not black box. He is up front in what he is doing and states he is calculating it the same way it was done before they (the gov) changed the way it is calculated (for their benefit). Until it can be proven he isn't calculating it as he says he is, he has as much credibility as those who say CPI is correct. If I could get specific info from him for your review and you found his calculations to be correct, then what? Would admit inflation is much higher than the 3 or 4% the BLS is telling us? Besides most of the country (91% in one poll) do not believe it is being calculated correctly. Why are you so sure we should trust the government on this? There are numerous instances of less than truthful government reporting over the history of this country. Politicians do fabricate, that's a given. Politicians have many reasons to be fudging the CPI.
I do not beilieve most of us are claiming it is off 7% a year either, maybe 2%, 3%, or 4%, that affects many things.
I feel like I'm repeating myself, but I'll try to respond.
The BLS is completely open about their methods. Dozens of researchers follow exactly what they do and they regularly write and discuss critiques of the BLS decisions. Read the short paper I referenced, especially the footnotes, and see if you still think they are successfully hiding something. This isn't the Pentagon or the CIA where lots of stuff is top secret.
I can't find anything remotely comparable on the shadowstatics site. Nobody can or does audit his calculations. He claims to understand both methods. If he wants to have credibility on a claim that he's better than the BLS, he should put out a side-by-side calculation that gives the BLS step-by-step detail on one page and his comparable detail on the facing page. That's what it would take to make me believe that he's more accurate.
In an earlier post I said that there is clearly some amount of judgement on this. I wouldn't disagree with someone studied the BLS methods and decided that the BLS is off by a percent.
I also pointed out that it's possible the entire difference is contained in the BLS treatment of owner-occupied housing. If that's the issue, then let's specify that the rest of the CPI calculation is okay, and agree to disagree with the BLS on housing.