Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mike_hearn | Hacker News Reader

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What's jerf is saying is that the systems and procedures end up being selected (to some extent maybe unconsciously) based on political considerations. This isn't a radical view. Economists and many other kinds of academics have a long history of adapting ideas, metrics and systems to please political masters. Or more accurately, to appear useful to political masters.

For example the famous 2% inflation goal is regularly presented as an apolitical target based on firm economic theory. In reality it was invented out of whole cloth for purely political reasons:

https://www.reuters.com/markets/mouse-that-roared-new-zealan...

What if, they asked, they just told everyone the rate should be much lower - say roughly 2% - and then aim for that?

"It was a bit of a shock to everyone, I think," said Roger Douglas, the Labour Party finance minister at the time who worked with the Treasury and Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) to pioneer the policy. "I just announced it was gonna be 2%, and it sort of stuck."

Like that, inflation targeting was born.

I think I understand what you're saying. Rather than "The Biden admin cooked the initial numbers to make themselves look good", it's more "The process for generating the initial numbers has been influenced by politics over the years to favor initially higher numbers." That does make sense and is certainly a possible and perhaps partial explanation for what's going on.

Yes and it's not specific to the US or any specific administration. It's also not in this case a long term thing, the problem has appeared quite recently.

Earlier this year a gap opened up between what Americans were reporting in economic confidence surveys and the official stats. Historically they've tracked very tightly, almost in lockstep, so that gives some confidence in the official data. Then suddenly Biden was touting an amazing economy and the job numbers departed from what people were reporting as their on-the-ground impression. The cause is probably double counting due to remote work, zombie job ads and so on: lots of jobs that are being advertised but are duplicates or don't really exist, caused by a combination of the pandemic and new job board websites. But if you're on Team Biden are you going to prioritize figuring out why the gap between your data and public sentiment has appeared? Maybe making yourself look bad in the process? Or will you decide that there are more important priorities elsewhere? It's probably the latter and won't even feel political, just like it's the right thing to do. Of course because these are unarticulated decisions not policies, there's always a risk of some other process or person coming in and rearranging priorities for you, which maybe is what happened here.

For another example look at the UK. Their population statistics are a mess and have been for many years. At one point the ONS even reclassified them as experimental. If you're a strongly pro-mass migration politician or cabinet, are you going to be down at the ONS giving them hell about this every day? Probably not. It's not that the numbers are cooked, but more that problems arise that nobody cares to fix because the fix would create new problems for them.

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