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I'm well aware of those nuances (i.e. Paasche vs Laspeyres indices).
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.
You have no direct evidence that the BLS or BEA engage in "clear deliberate manipulation" or "cooked to hell and back by essentially every government of every State".
As far as I can tell, you seem to believe there are only two types of knowledge:
With little appreciation for anything in between.
There is value to having documented methodology. There is value to applying statistical sampling methodology. There is value to consistent methodology over time. There is value to peer review.
There are value to all of those even when done imperfectly.
One of these days, y'all will accept that your "lying eyes" literally match the official data.
Well not quite. I believe there is a priori knowledge which can be doubted because of our inability to perfectly apply logic, and a posteriori knowledge which can be doubted even more because of our inability to directly observe the mechanisms of reality and our need to rely on models build through imperfect observation of effects.
These models have indeed a hierarchy of credibility, one where physics clearly stands as more credible than economics, but both of them can in my opinion be seriously and reasonably entirely doubted because they rely on an irrational postulation that reality can be correctly modeled from the inside.
All these mechanisms you list are modeling tools I can indeed brush off easily if they are inconvenient or don't produce useful results because unlike you I have no unconditional faith in their foundations. Science is not the search for truth. It's a pragmatic modeling exercice.
There is no inherent epistemic value to the rituals you list. You may as well argue scripture is holy. Either those rituals produce useful models or they don't, and loyalty to the rituals qua rituals is a completely irrational exercise.
Given how much economics has sucked at building any consistent predictive model of inflation as a phenomenon, I'm still puzzled as to why I should consider econometrics to be of any use to me. Whether it agrees with my profane observations or not.
You think it is irrational to think we can model physics from the inside? What does it even mean to "seriously" doubt physics?
I agree. I value things like standardized methodology, because of its pragmatic value, not it's "inherent" value (whatever that means). To wit, contrary to your claims, I do not have "unconditional faith in their foundations". I value standardized methodology, peer review, and all the rest, because I use them on a daily basis at work and such methodologies are incredibly useful for making good decisions and improving your understanding of complex systems.
You have been arguing that government measures of past inflation/unemployment are bullshit - not that academic models predicting future inflation are bullshit. Even if you proved the latter, it would have essentially no bearing on whether the former were true.
Yes, I think the postulate that science, a fortiori physics, works is irrational. I also think it's true. On faith alone.
I speak of seriousness because people will often claim this doubt is inconsequential. It isn't, because unlike people who believe the universe is coherent, I hold miracles to be possible. I do not believe any have happened, but I cannot exclude the possibility, whilst the scientist has to as a matter of course.
If you do value methodology purely for its utility as you say, then you must agree with me that economics is untrustworthy based on it's poor prediction power or disagree that it makes poor predictions. And if it is the latter you have to tell me why you do indeed believe that.
As for the quibble about measure and prediction being different, it's simply wrong. To measure phenomena and to model phenomena is part of the same inextricable process and chain of implication and trust.
Newtons do not make sense without a theory of classical mechanics, as CPI doesn't make sense without a theory of inflation and price. It's a package deal, you can't reliably measure something without resting on a model of what that thing is. Not even counting sheep is immune from having to trust that there is such a thing as a discrete sheep.
This is a pedantic philosophical piece of sophistry. You don't believe in Newton's laws of motion through "faith alone". There may be, in a pedantic sense, "faith" in that believing in induction requires faith, but there's a reason you believe "an object at rest tends to stay at rest" and not "an object at rest tends to morph into elephant ears". This is not "faith alone" - it is a mustard seed of faith abetted by enormous tons of evidence, reason, and (yes) utility.
"Trustworthy" is not a binary and "economics" is a sufficiently diverse discipline that you shouldn't lump it all together. Can economists measure inflation well enough to be useful? Yes. Can economists predicts stock price movements? Not really (with some exceptions). But using economists' lack of ability to predict stocks to infer they can't measure inflation is pure hogwash.
No? I can measure how tall you are without any kind of model regarding what makes people grow or why some people are taller than others. By the same token, this
is wrong. So wrong. Measuring something doesn't require predicting it.
And this is fundie tier cope that tries to cling to the holiness of its symbols and rituals like "evidence" as if they carried knowledge within themselves instead of being instruments.
Are accusations of pedantry the best you can come up with to ground your epistemology?
This is weak man, you're reenacting Socrates' targets a lot more literally than you claim I do.
But I suppose I have as much chance of convincing you of the possibility of miracles as I do a priest the possibility of their absence. Because both of you confuse utility with truth.
Be humble. We don't know shit.
What is tallness? You say you want to measure it, which means it must be a variable, which means you already concede to have a theory of it, even if it one so crude as to have it be some non fixed property of humans. Which is already a falsifiable assumption.
And this is to say nothing of how complex the notion of length even is, no less than the intellectual achievement of centuries and entire civilizations. By no means something obvious.
Inflation is exactly the same. A phenomenon can only be measured empirically insofar as it is theorized. And it is methodologically impossible to measure something that can't be formulated as a thing in the first place.
Nobody measured the speed of light, the electric charge of an electron of indeed the length of a person before having in mind some mental representation of those things being measured. It's not possible.
A measure is inherently an experiment. And I find it weird you'd deny this if you are any kind of an empiricist.
Economists do not have a consensual explanation for or definition of what inflation even is.
You'll have to excuse me if I doubt their ability to measure a phenomenon they can't even agree on a definition of.
But I guess since you think one can measure something they can't even conceptualize, I shouldn't be surprised. Though how exactly you can pretend to evaluate the accuracy of that unfathomable measure is beyond me.
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