I don’t know why the “img src” didn’t post for that chart (blocked by your site?): Try this link instead.

Perhaps it’s a question of competing suspicions. I can justifiably look with jaundiced eyes at government-published numbers (squinting at them at different degrees depending on their dubiousness). At least there’s a good ‘literature’ on the caveats of these government numbers.

If Tanner Scheppers “didn’t file a formal report because Cleveland police told him that it was unlikely the attackers would be apprehended. “It happens a lot, actually,” they told him.” then we have some reason to suspect the accuracy of evaluating one’s risk of being the victim in Cleveland of being a victim of a ‘random’ black-on-white racial-hate-crime street-assault.

But on the other hand I’ll be even more doubtful of claims about our world that aren’t backed by presentations of quantitative data – where even more mischief can be played with words. It just so happens that we lack an infrastructure of ‘alternative statistics’ philanthropy. We do have alternative statistics markets – but they keep their numbers under tight controls for the sake of profit and confidentiality. We also deal with a world in which professors at public universities working with tax-funded grants, in public-subsidized journals keep their data (occasionally at odds with official-dome) and methodology close to their vests. We also now lack (some) public prediction markets to supply information about the market’s degree of confidence in certain kinds of data. But markets can screw-up too.

What’s a poor, free-time-starved, internet-crank like me to do? So government numbers are what we’ve got. And some of them – like quantities and prices of particular commodities – are perfectly fine and provide me a way to explain certain phenomena about our world:

For example – consider “real personal income less transfers per capita, deflated to nominal, inflated by oil price”:

The private income of the US can buy the average person how many barrels of oil? What periods are loose or tight, more like subsidies to the overall-economy or more like drains? Does this match our subjective experience (yes, in my case). Does it help us understand a certain aspect of the struggles to preserve ‘living standards’ and ‘quality of life’ and ‘middle class welfare’ – as the generation of whites who fled to the safety of the suburbs and exurbs, and the generationally-unchangeable housing stock built on certain assumptions, and the long-commutes needed to support it all – suddenly become increasingly unsupportable.

Well, anyway, it’s numbers for me. Lemons, perhaps, but I’ll make lemonade. I’ll the best with what I’ve got.

http://www.libertarian.co.uk/lapubs/persp/persp019.htm

“Despite the futility of the questions, they asked themselves over and over: How could we have put up with this degradation? How could we have allowed this to happen? How could we have accepted such inhumanity for so long?”

The next step being, ‘I guess we shouldn’t allow it again.’

“During the time I was in Czechoslovakia, the vilest epithet one Czech could hurl at another was jsi stára struktura: “you are old structure”. It meant: you sold out to socialism, you were an active part of the collectivist power structure, you abetted the destruction of our lives and our country. It was reserved for the most diehard communists, and in all my time in Czechoslovakia I never heard it addressed directly at any person (except in jest between good friends), as it was too horrible a thing to accuse of someone face-to-face.”

They now recognize evil for what it is. Can you say the same of any western country?

“You know, each one of us has a little bit of the stára struktura deep in his heart, and it will remain there for the rest of our lives.”

They recognize evil even in themselves.

Perhaps this is my optimism talking, but you can probably make a Czech politician unelectable with a single reasonable insult of stara struktura. (Or perhaps they say that all the time to each other anyway, so it’s meaningless to a pol.)

http://izrailit.blogspot.ca/2009/11/wall.html

We left Russia in April. One week later, on May 1st, we saw a small Communist demonstration in the streets of Vienna. The realization that those people were there entirely voluntarily, without anyone threatening them or offering them toilet paper or an extra day off work was stunning. “They are insane,” offered an older neighbor for an explanation. I was a innocent young girl then, at least in some ways, and wondered why they don’t move to Russia. “Not that insane,” suggested the neighbor.

Russians recognize insanity when they see it, and know better than to think keeping quiet about it is polite.

Then there’s this humbling and delightful exchange. Emphasis mine.

Wherever I go, whether my audience consists of local students, congressional staffers, or post-Soviet professors, when I present the Trolley case and ask them whether they would switch tracks, about ninety percent will say, “there has to be another way!”

A philosophy professor’s first reaction is to say, “Please, stay on topic. I’m trying to illustrate a point here! To see the point, you need to decide what to do when there is no other way.”

When I said this to my class of post-Soviet professors, though, they spoke briefly among themselves in Russian, then two of them quietly said (as others nodded, every one of them looking me straight in the eye), “Yes, we understand. We have heard this before. All our lives we were told the few must be sacrificed for the sake of many. We were told there is no other way. What we were told was a lie. There was always another way.

The unfortunate implication is that it takes communism to teach the average voter what evil is.

Of course, adding in Moldbug’s recent explicit comments at Sailer’s, what I’d like to see isn’t ‘American’ GDP per capita but hipster GDP and IWSB GDP and Mexican-underclass-immigrant GDP. Oh, and HNWI (high net wealth investor) GDP. Those would be fascinating. (HNWI population has been going up since the end of 2011.)

The median wage has been falling in real terms…whose median wage? ‘American’s?’

Our integrity has been damaged by progressivism, and I wonder what else.

It’s important that distributed economic agents have the tools they need to facilitate rational decision making in the market place. First among these, of course, is a durable, market-tested, spontaneously appreciated, medium of exchange, immune against political manipulation. Is it of comparable importance that ‘economic oversight’ — even of a disinterested, purely academic kind — is facilitated by reliable metrics? If it is, the case at least needs to be made.

It’s not like these notions and the metrics and indices we used to estimate them haven’t been criticized and argued over for a century. People have made careers out of proposing refinements and alternatives (e.g. Barnett’s Divisia measure of the effective Money Supply), or even more valuably, spelling out the caveats and the limits of pragmatic usefulness.

But, for all their artificiality and fudges and kludges, it turns out that out clunky efforts seem to correlate well with things that are measurable in straightforward, accurate, and non-controversial ways. Indeed, it is the fact that a lot of real-world economic variable tend to correlate well with each other that explains the usefulness of the metrics.

If you are trying to measure ‘production’ and ‘consumption and it turns out that this phoney-baloney GDP combined with the concocted fabrication of Inflation tends to move in sync with an accurate count of widgets and the price they are going for on the market, well, you might just conclude that for all their faults these numbers, if imperfect, are nevertheless good enough for certain kinds of analysis if not abused.

Personally, I prefer approaches that are more modest, specific, and constrained in their presentation. For instance, holding a ‘standard of living’ consumption-basket fixed instead of allowing for substitutions helps provide more direct comparisons, but this is exactly what ‘shadow-stats’ does and the formula is visibly something close to “CPI plus 3 percent” with identical derivatives. Not bad for bogus.

But all this leads to what I’ve been suggesting for several years now – the people should be proposing alternatives. Don’t like Fiat money? Come up with a proposal for a business plan to produce an instrument that does better. Don’t like ‘inflation’ or ‘gdp’ – propose a different metric so we can discuss changes in the economy without being paralyzed. It’s a moderate and creative approach that’s better than intellectual nullification.