At around 28/4/06 11:55 am, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Everyone is influenced by ideology - there's no way to escape it. As
> Jim pointed out, the only thing that counts in the official stats is
> monetary exchange, which is, after all, a pretty limited metric for
> judging human life. But that's capitalism for you. But within that
> constraint, the numbers are collected and published quite cleanly,
> with minimal political influence (in the narrow, partisan sense of
> political, not the upper-case sense of big-time Ideology: i.e.,
> George Bush doesn't call the BEA and tell them to cook up the gross
> product by industry series, but the system itself is one based on
> monetary transactions). If they were cooked in the way that Leigh and
> others like to say, bourgeois economists and central bankers wouldn't
> be using them.
>
Good, that clarifies it somewhat. But I feel your trust, in economists
and central bankers as a sort of verification mechanism, is more than a
bit generous. As a lowly geek, I watched in wonder as bankers and
economists (and people like Greenspan, so I don't mean just investment
bankers) ran up the .com boom in the late 90s. Each time I tried to open
my mouth, "But..." someone would respond "Well, this is the new
economy... you just don't get it". ;-) Another example: very, very
serious, open, honest people (and most often these are non-humanist[*]
left wingers and economists) believe that human population is not
stressing world resources. I think they are wrong and that's not just
because I am a know-nothing ;-), but because their models and
measurements are insufficient (this I realize is not the criticism you
are responding to).
You may also have to take into consideration the other issue raised in
Jim's post: that indices are redefined so that the practitioners do not
have to practice dishonesty at all (his examples were unemployment and
the CPI). Perhaps the burden of proving (or at least demonstrating some
valid suspicion) that is the case, falls on Leigh, in this instance.
--ravi
[*] By non-humanist left wingers I do not mean that these left wingers
are not non-humanist, but only that their leftism is not based (as I see
it) on humanism, but on other things. Its a poor term and I apologize in
advance.
--
Support something better than yourself: ;-)
PeTA: http://www.peta.org/
GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/
