SubscribeThe National Association for Business Economics sounded a warning on a topic near and dear to its heart this morning: economic indicators.and btw: "...globalized economies have become much more dynamic and fluid and fast-moving, which makes them much harder to measure. But at the same time, statistical agencies have become intellectual backwaters, home to underpaid and underfunded technocrats who receive roughly zero in the way of thanks or glory and who are much more likely to be on the receiving end of budget cuts than they are to get the significant increases in funding..."
A statement from the chair of the NABE’s statistics committee, Haver Analytics President Maurine Haver, asserted that “just when reliable and timely indicators are needed most, resources devoted to their production at our federal statistical agencies have been cut, requiring the termination of data series or a reduction in sample sizes used to produce the data.”
Ms. Haver catalogs the casualties of budgetary tightening [and] goes on to say the association may ask readers to write letters to representatives “in support of agency budgets as the subcommittees meet to review fiscal 2009 funding.”
...there would be no separate tax accounting basis — the IRS would use GAAP... Can you imagine how many accountants, attorneys and actuaries would be unemployed by this? ...A proposal like this, that makes taxation more immediate, and more transparent, would make people more concerned about where their taxes go, because they would feel it more acutely...so you'd reconcile cash with accrual (and the assumptions used to make it so) then put it all up online so people can make up their own mind on what it all means. that's the promise of the internet -- by exposing databases and APIs to the public, they can aggregate and disaggregate data to their hearts content and make it useful to them.**
In 1913 "Ford required between 13,000 and 14,000 workers to run his plants at any one time, and in that year over 50,000 workers quit." At the end of the same year, in order to add 100 persons to the workforce in one factory, the company found it necessary to add 963 workers.Ford was a businessman and he didn't just pay high wages out of the kindness of his heart.
Transportation 18%Meanwhile, trips in the subway are about twice the national average.
Gas is 5.2% of spending
nationwide, but only 3.8
percent in the New York area.
...large data sets are producing more unreliable predictions, given current procedures. That's because maximum likelihood estimators use data to identify the single most probable solution. But because any one data point swims in an increasingly immense sea, it's not likely to be representative...btw, here's tim duy on misunderstanding the CPI:
"Using maximum likelihood estimation, the most likely outcome would be very, very, very unlikely," Lawrence said, "so we knew we needed a better estimation method."
Lawrence and Carvahlo used statistical decision theory to understand the limitations of the old procedure when faced with new "high-D" problems [high dimensional unknowns produce enormous statistical uncertainty]. They also used statistical decision-making theory to find an estimation procedure that applies to a broad range of statistical problems. These "centroid" estimators identify not the single most probable solution, but the solution that is most representative of all the data in a set...
[T]he debate over the use of OER in the CPI is something of a false debate. In my opinion, it misses the point entirely. The debate is not whether housing costs are miscalculated in the CPI – the BLS’s basic methodology is appropriate to achieve their objective. The debate is whether or not the Fed should include assets prices, such as home prices, in their policy objective of price stability. Just because there is a valid argument that the Fed should be using a measure other than (or in addition to) consumer prices does not imply that the CPI is flawed. It implies that the construction of monetary policy is flawed. In effect, the BLS is unfairly criticized for the Fed’s policy error.cheers!
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posted by zeoslap at 8:14 AM on May 5, 2008