Doug Henwood wrote:
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.
George Bush isn't smart enough to 'cook the books', despite his Yale education, and too smart to demand that behavior from the economics sector of the federal government's bureaucracy... and I NEVER said it was a deliberate act.
Please note: I take umbrage at your statement:
and worse, you don't care.
Jim Devine wrote:
In any event, many of the stats aren't very good at capturing empirical reality. All of them simply give one view of the world, one that needs to be complemented by other views, includng other stats. In the end, any problem with the stats does not mean that we should reject the job of testing our assertions against some sort of real-world phenomenon and simply talk out of our hats.
It's the disparity between the "real-world phenomenon" and the 'number crunchers' that fascinates me. I've been a Manufacturing/Industrial worker most of my life, including such related industries as truck driving the product of U.S. industry to it's destination, the businesses where people purchase the product. To use truck driving as an example, many of the jobs in semi-trailer trucking now days consists of moving containerized freight from U.S. ports to distribution centers around the country, not from the manufacturing facility to the store. What does that particular bit of information say about U.S. manufacturing capacity... how and where is that represented on a spreadsheet? I believe I posted an Alternet article a while back that illustrates the disintegration of American manufacturing, from a corporate officer's perspective. http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2006w15/msg00000.htm AlterNet Excerpt: The Disposable American By Louis Uchitelle, AlterNet Posted on April 7, 2006, Printed on April 9, 2006 http://www.alternet.org/story/34015/ <...> For all his regrets, Davis by the mid-1980s had clearly become skilled at layoffs. He had bitten into the apple, if you will. "I was forced to get used to layoffs," he told me. What he had begun, his handpicked successor, Richard H. Ayers, an industrial engineer with a bent for efficiency, accelerated. Ayers closed a huge distribution center in New Britain and reopened it in Charlotte, N.C. -- away from unions. Other operations also moved south or overseas. Under Ayers, the merchandise Stanley sold in America was increasingly not made in America. Sledgehammers and crowbars now came from a Stanley plant in Mexico, socket wrenches from a company purchased in Taiwan, a trickle of door hinges and latches from China, the result of a new joint venture. <...> Note: Richard H. Ayers, was (is?) an industrial engineer (counted as a "Manufacturing job"?) who eventually 'manufactured' most of the layoffs at Stanley Works which kept people in the corporate offices in Connecticut, but not on the factory floor. In the head of that post I wrote: "The union there was a remnant of an upholsterer's union that was ineffectual in it's entirety. The 'young turks' (Yeah, that was me, and a couple of others) on the contract negotiating committee took to demanding Groundhog Day as a paid day off, as we had no real clout, no support from the national upholstery union (if it really existed at all) and the best we could do was make management's life miserable. New Britain Connecticut, the headquarters location, was rapidly becoming a slum city, and Stanley Works was trying to expand and diversify it's product line, adding items far outside it's traditional realm, like imported garage door openers, in a desperate attempt to compete with foreign imports, as was their main U.S. competition New Britain Tool. That was, IMHO, the organization's "beginning of the end" in American industry, right before the advent of the American service industry's rise to the top of the financial food chain." Which seems to be the same view held by (at least) the article's author. "Write about what you know first, you can always write about what you don't know later" --Richard Brautigan, personal advice to a writing student. Leigh http://leighm.net/
