Fake Statistics Pointed Out by Kevin Philips - Brightwork Research & Analysis

Executive Summary

Something Rotten in Denmark
The Quotation from Harpers

Something Rotten in Denmark

The first time I knew something was wrong with economics statistics is when I read that the inflation rate leaves out house prices over $400,000. However, I never considered how this related to the housing bubble. It’s interesting how we focus on numbers as a society, but very rarely ever noticing if the numbers are actually right. This in highly concerning because we are awash in fake numbers. Most college students are taught to stand in awe of statistics. Statistics demonstrate what is true. I was taught to be impressed with statistical techniques, to pray at the

Statistics demonstrate what is true. I was taught to be impressed with statistical techniques and pray at the R-squared value’s altar. What was left out is the topic of the bias of the creators of statistics. This is assumed to be a non-issue, let us just focus on the math and all the sexy statistics techniques the universities teach. The truth is just the opposite. Excel can calculate the most advanced statistics and using Excel to do this can be taught to surprisingly young people. However, the truth is sophisticated statistics are not necessary and, in most cases are a sign of trouble.

These are excerpts from this article was from Harpers.

https://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/05/0082023

Instead, since the 1960s, Washington has been forced to gull its citizens and creditors by debasing official statistics: the vital instruments with which the vigor and muscle of the American economy are measured. The effect, over the past twenty-five years, has been to create a false sense of economic achievement and rectitude, allowing us to maintain artificially low interest rates, massive government borrowing, and a dangerous reliance on mortgage and financial debt even as real economic growth has been slower than claimed. If Washington’s harping on weapons of mass destruction was essential to buoy public support for the invasion of Iraq, the use of deceptive statistics has played its own vital role in convincing many Americans that the U.S. economy is stronger, fairer, more productive, more dominant, and richer with opportunity than it actually is.

In a more consequential move, he asked his second Federal Reserve chairman, Arthur Burns, to develop what became an ultimately famous division between “core” inflation and headline inflation. If the Consumer Price Index was calculated by tracking a bundle of prices, so-called core inflation would simply exclude, because of “volatility,” categories that happened to be troublesome: at that time, food and energy. Core inflation could be spotlighted when the headline number was embarrassing, as it was in 1973 and 1974. (The economic commentator Barry Ritholtz has joked that core inflation is better called “inflation ex-inflation”—i.e., inflation after the inflation has been excluded.)

In 1983, under the Reagan Administration, inflation was further finagled when the Bureau of Labor Statistics decided that housing, too, was overstating the Consumer Price Index; the BLS substituted an entirely different “Owner Equivalent Rent” measurement, based on what a homeowner might get for renting his or her house. This methodology, controversial at the time but still in place today, simply sidestepped what was happening in the real world of homeowner costs.

Last year, the word “opacity,” hitherto reserved for Scrabble games, became a mainstay of the financial press. A credit market panic had been triggered by something called collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), which in some cases were too complicated to be fathomed even by experts. The packagers and marketers of CDOs were forced to acknowledge that their hypertechnical securities were fraught with “opacity”—a convenient, ethically and legally judgment-free word for lack of honest labeling. And far from being rare, opacity is commonplace in contemporary finance. Intricacy has become a conduit for deception.

Moreover, since the 1990s, the CPI has been subjected to three other adjustments, all downward and all dubious: product substitution (if flank steak gets too expensive, people are assumed to shift to hamburger, but nobody is assumed to move up to filet mignon), geometric weighting (goods and services in which costs are rising most rapidly get a lower weighting for a presumed reduction in consumption), and, most bizarrely, hedonic adjustment, an unusual computation by which additional quality is attributed to a product or service.

“All in all,” Williams points out, “if you were to peel back changes that were made in the CPI going back to the Carter years, you’d see that the CPI would now be 3.5 percent to 4 percent higher”—meaning that, because of lost CPI increases, Social Security checks would be 70 percent greater than they currently are.

The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans, would be a face full of cold water. Based on the criteria in place a quarter century ago, today’s U.S. unemployment rate is somewhere between 9 percent and 12 percent; the inflation rate is as high as 7 or even 10 percent;

Under-measurement of inflation, in particular, hangs over our heads like a guillotine. To acknowledge it would send interest rates climbing, and thereby would endanger the viability of the massive buildup of public and private debt (from less than $11 trillion in 1987 to $49 trillion last year) that props up the American economy. Moreover, the rising cost of pensions, benefits, borrowing, and interest payments—all indexed or related to inflation—could join with the cost of financial bailouts to overwhelm the federal budget. As inflation and interest rates have been kept artificially suppressed, the United States has been indentured to its volatile financial sector, with its predilection for leverage and risky buccaneering.

Arguably, the unraveling has already begun. As Robert Hardaway, a professor at the University of Denver, pointed out last September, the subprime lending crisis “can be directly traced back to the [1983] BLS decision to exclude the price of housing from the CPI. . . . With the illusion of low inflation inducing lenders to offer 6 percent loans, not only has speculation run rampant on the expectations of ever-rising home prices, but home buyers by the millions have been tricked into buying homes even though they only qualified for the teaser rates.” Were mainstream interest rates to jump into the 7 to 9 percent range—which could happen if inflation were to spur new concern—both Washington and Wall Street would be walking in quicksand. The make-believe economy of the past two decades, with its asset bubbles, massive borrowing, and rampant data distortion, would be in serious jeopardy. The U.S. dollar, off more than 40 percent against the euro since 2002, could slip down an even rockier slope.

The conclusion from these paragraphs is inescapable, elites are using phony statistics to accrue more benefits to themselves and to short change the rest of society. Fake inflation numbers hold of people from asking for cost of living adjustments and depreciate their savings over time. This needs to be much more discussed.