On Mon, 2009-01-05 at 13:51 -0800, Shane Taylor wrote: > 3. Non-critical acceptance of official data from BEA, BLS, Commerce led > to only a passing familiarity with reality;
Here is a little fact: """For the fourth quarter of 2004, according to OECD, (source Employment Outlook 2005 ISBN 92-64-01045-9), normalized unemployment for men aged 25 to 54 was 4.6% in the USA and 7.4% in France. At the same time and for the same population the employment rate (number of workers divided by population) was 86.3% in the U.S. and 86.7% in France. This example shows that the unemployment rate is 60% higher in France than in the USA, yet more people in this demographic are working in France than in the USA, which is counterintuitive if it is expected that the unemployment rate reflects the health of the labor market""" Number of economists using unemployment measure as is to prove superiority of X or Y policy/country: 100% Number of economists studying this discrepancy: 0% +/- 1% (1) (2) Raw economics data is also top secret: there is a big incentive for the profession to keep data out of the public eye to avoid embarassing debates (inflation comes to mind, why are hedonic adjustments not public for example?). Laurent (1) of the hundreds of economist I presented with this evidence only Dean Baker reacted positively, but he also predicted this crisis (correlation is not causation :) (2) it's easy to disprove this affirmation: cite a paper _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
