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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   24896 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".

Subsets of aggregate data can move in different directions from the summary statistics of the whole dataset. Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.

And stuff like this:

  1. Republicans think the economy is doing absolutely terribly, much worse than Democrats think, and 3) that most of this perception difference is because Biden, a Democrat, currently occupies the White House.

Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).

What's actually going on here is that the chattering classes and the politicians and bureaucrats they support are finding, once again, that they can't actually tell people what to think about their personal lives. It's baldly obvious that this group doesn't actually know what they're talking about any functionally better than most people and that their ability to cite macro statistics is more an attempt to cast a magic spell than a real explanation of ground truth.

This is a lot of words to write, "I don't understand why aggregate statistics don't apply to the individual".

That is not an accurate description of what I wrote. Like, at all.

There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".

Is bordering on outright delusional. There are more Americans than just Democrats and Republicans and you don't get 55% fair/poor personal financial situation from just Republicans (no matter how much I'd love for 55% of Americans to be Republicans, alas).

Nothing in the article you posted contradicts what I said in either of my posts. Also, the "bordering on outright delusional" line is unnecessarily hostile.

There were many people who said "local costs are up in some goods more than average statistics would suggest". My beef isn't with people who concluded that "because of this + negativity bias, things feel worse than they actually are", it's with the people claiming "because of this, economic data are rigged and useless".

Perhaps you might have saved yourself a lot of words had you considered, "Maybe I'm wrong about the actual state of things for many people", and, "The economic data are accurate within the gamut of what they're actually measuring", aren't mutually exclusive things.

There were absolutely people who were equivocating the two, see many (though not all) of the examples I posted above.

Trying to understand why people don't take selected macro statistics as gospel truth about their own lives is, to use a common phrase, extremely out of touch.

It depends on the purpose of the discussion.

Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.

Is it to vent? They don't.

The question to ask: why are we on this forum?

Is it to discuss policy? Is it to discuss aggregate public perception? Averages matter.

Which averages matter a lot.

Of course, there is no real policy discussion going on with these discussions of macro statistics. It's just Lefty professionals sneering at the rest of the country and saying, "Why won't you just do what I tell you and vote for the Democrats?"

Again and again, I see people here assuming that because the press and twitter academics are biased, it obviously implies that stats nerds in the BEA and BLS are biased. But, again, I've never seen evidence for this.

Reasons for skepticism:

  1. For a while, the numbers differed material from ADP’s numbers until ADP figured out the adjustment BLS was making. Generally you’d expect these numbers to be somewhat similar but BLS was running materially different and hot for awhile. So it wasn’t just the difference but the consistent direction of the difference.

  2. Job numbers continue to surprise the market to the upside sometimes beating expectations by multiple sigmas. That shouldn’t statistically happen MoM unless something screwy is happening with the numbers.

  3. I forget how many consecutive months there was a downward adjustment to the numbers but it was a number of months. Curious again the uniform direction.

  4. The establishment and household departed pretty drastically.

  5. Given what we’ve seen the last five years about DC bureaucracy why should we assume the BLS is different?

Just to be clear, from your points it looks like you've completely abandoned the topic of inflation, right? We're now dealing entirely with job numbers?

  1. I would love a link to know what you are referring to here. The only discussion I've heard around that topic is adjusting for seasonality, but that shouldn't cause a "consistent direction of the difference".
  2. The normality assumption is rarely perfectly matched and multi-sigma events happen all the time. This is an oft-recurring them in my job. I'm not sure what job numbers surprising the market has to do with proving the job numbers are bullshit.
  3. All that is evidence for is that errors aren't always independent month-to-month. Again, as anyone who has worked with real data will tell you (especially time series) independence is almost never a valid assumption. Real life is not Stats 101.
  4. What does this mean? Is this just "lived experience". If so, the one time someone on this forum provided their receipts, they closely matched the official data. So, I'm not seeing this.
  5. Because virtually all charges I've seen levied on this forum that have evidence are about politicians/academics/journalists being biased and misinterpreting data or intentionally emphasizing certain data over others to serve a narrative. I don't think I've ever seen anyone on this forum provide evidence that nerds outputting the metrics are biased, let alone that they're falsifying metrics or following biased methodologies.

  1. ADP is a payroll company. They put out numbers. The numbers generally are close to BLS because well ADP is the primary payroll provider in the US. About a year ago, there started to be a pretty big divergence.

  2. Some of the beats were something like six sigma. It is weird to have that many very large sigma events on one data source.

  3. Yes of course things aren’t independent. My suggestion is it isn’t independent because the BLS is cooking the books.

  4. There are two data points BLS puts out. The first is establishment survey which goes into unemployment number. The second is the household survey. Granted, the latter is measuring something slightly different. But historically these two surveys end up with total number of employed that are very similar. There has been a large difference for about 1.5 years since BLS started aggressively applying adjustment to establishment. The household correlates very well with street expectations. The Philly fed even put out a paper on this. Again, this suggests the establishment is being manipulated. Latest household suggests we are in recession range for jobs.

  1. Can you please provide a link?
  2. I'm saying is that, for anyone who works with temporal datasets, what you are saying is not much of a red flag. Unless there is additional context (maybe a link?).
  3. Again, for anyone who works with temporal datasets, what you are saying is not much of a red flag. Unless, again, there is additional context (maybe a link?)
  4. "The Philly fed even put out a paper on this" - can you provide a link?

I don’t have a link to the ADP. I remember seeing the beats when they come out.

Re 2 and 3, show that historically we often see these kinds of beats in something as important to markets as unemployment numbers. Until then I think multiple multiple sigma beats to the upside (followed by uniform revision downward adjustments of prior month) is suggestive of something.

Re 4 had trouble finding the paper but here is a Forbes link discussing it. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2022/12/23/upon-further-review-that-hot-labor-market-is-really-ice-cold/?sh=23befc8c72b5

Very few of these sneers are coming from the BEA or BLS directly, who mostly are just grinding out the incredible work they have always done (along with all the other statistical agencies in the Federal government), and whose feet I worship at.

But the sneers themselves remain dumb. They come from the ideologically incurious. The puffed up underinformed. The boys at the BLS know that the sub-aggregates matter, too, that's why they do stuff like break things down by industry, region, or state. But the commentariat just knows the national macro aggregates look good, so why won't the deplorable love Biden? He's an on old white guy, isn't he? They love that shit.

I assumed you were like a plurality of commenters here who think the stats themselves are bogus. Mea culpa.

Not a problem. It may have behooved me to be explicit with where my concerns lay. I have respect verging on awe for the amount of statistics various branches of the Federal government collect and release to the public.

Because the same power that wants people's minds to be made up by academia doesn't allow this forum to exist elsewhere. That's why.

Statistics are a useful mathematical tool. Statistics made by other people about anything remotely political is almost necessarily nonsense propaganda.

The incentives that econometrics have to lie are so great you might as well ask a Soviet Factory manager how many tons of steel he actually produced.

And yes that means one's lying eyes are back in the competition for an epistemic framework on those issues.

The one time someone tried to prove to me that the official data was too low by citing their own personal receipts, the receipts ended up matching the official data.

It would be great if one of the numerous people here making these claims had evidence that the CPI stats are being gamed instead of having to resorting to "academia and the media is biased => the BEA and BLS stats nerds are biased"

We can look at the various changes to the basket of goods and how it really doesn't measure anything except the cost of living for NEETs (the heavy underemphasis on energy and housing I see as clear deliberate manipulation for instance).

And this is to say nothing of unemployment numbers which have been cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State.

the heavy underemphasis on energy and housing I see as clear deliberate manipulation for instance

Let's look at the weights of the CPI-U as of 2022-Dec:

  • 7.5% - Rent of primary residence
  • 25.4% - Owners' equivalent rent of residences
  • 3.6% - Household energy
  • 3.3% - Motor fuel

I've ensured no overlap between the categories.

So, that's 32.9% of the CPI is housing and 6.9% is energy.

You believe these numbers are heavily underemphasized and are a "clear deliberate manipulation".

Please elaborate.

unemployment numbers... have been cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State.

Please elaborate.

There's different opinions on what is under/overstated in CPI so you might disagree on specifics, but the tricks you can use to manipulate it are well known at this point.

One is to readjust the methodology to the new habits of consumers, which allows you to pretend adaptations to higher costs of living are normal and lower the measured impact of inflation or to game the new and improved allocation to fit to local price changes and constantly change the methodology. Gas is so much more expensive people drive less? Cost of living is not going up, people just choose to spend more on Netflix and less on driving around.

Another is to use good substitutions and the other mechanisms by which you pick which actual goods to track. You can either substitute for cheaper goods as if they had equal value or fail to report shrinkflation and keep tracking the price of a good that is cheaper under the same name.

As for unemployment, there's as many methods to cheat as there are systems to measure it. In France the traditional way to cheat is to exclude from the numbers people who can't find work after a certain time and vary that amount of time to massage the figure. But we also cook it by excluding people from it if they're on some government benefits and in other situations that you can make a plausible argument for but apply to a lot of people who do work to live in practice.

I'm well aware of those nuances (i.e. Paasche vs Laspeyres indices).

  1. I don't see what that has to do with your claim that housing and energy are "heavily underemphasized".
  2. CPI is mostly a Laspeyres index, which means it is generally biased upwards compared to other indices (i.e. GDP deflator).

Re unemployment, I'm not sure this matters much unless you can show that the definitions have been changed to benefit someone.

More generally, you're basically saying "there exist degrees of freedom in defining these metrics".

Sure.

But the distance between that and allegations of "clear deliberate manipulation" and "cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State" is HUGE. You haven't even begun to cross that line.

#MotteAndBailey

The motte is that a specific defence of a specific mode of calculation of a specific metric that says what you want to say is possible in comparison to all other metrics.

The bailey is that this is in any way more rigorous or evidential than anecdotes.

It's the foundational fallacy behind scientific government really. And the hubris behind all empiricism as applied to the humanities.

I am and remain skeptical of even the possibility of knowledge. So you won't get me to go along with getting drawn in a debate about minutiae because I reject that we even have a method to measure cost of living reliably. CPI is essentially nonsense. It's cooked alright, and you seem to be aware of the cooking methods, though we may disagree on direction or size of the cook. But the core idea doesn't make sense in the first place and I'm unconvinced it's measuring anything but the broadest of trends.

I see no reason to believe the three letter indices with a ton of caveats politicians constantly meddle with over my lying eyes. I have to work a lot more at a much more prestigious job to afford a less spacious and furnished house than my parents at the same age. And they can't afford to heat theirs in the winter as much as they did even though they have more money on paper. I don't really think there's any data based argument that will convince me that's not happening.

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