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