BLS DAILY REPORT, WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 11, 1996 RELEASED TODAY: The Producer Price Index for Finished Goods advanced 0.4 percent in November, seasonally adjusted. This followed a 0.4 percent increase in October and a 0.2 percent rise in September ....Among finished goods in November, increases in the indexes for finished energy goods and for finished goods less foods and energy offset a decline in the index for finished consumer foods. Prices for finished goods less foods and energy turned up 0.1 percent after falling 0.3 percent in the prior month .... A Washington Post article (page A1) by Steven Pearlstein, "A Single Number Puts the Economy in a New Light," says that the price index has a huge effect, and changing it isn't so simple ....When a panel reported that the CPI has been overstating the inflation rate for at least 25 years, it was something other than a ploy to balance the federal budget. It was an assertion by five of the country's top economists that much of what we thought we knew about the U.S. economy was just plain wrong. Stagnant wages, lagging productivity, lackluster economic growth, a looming Social Security crisis -- suddenly, all these anxieties looked like they could be made to disappear with the wave of a statistical magic wand ....The CPI is embedded in nearly every important measure that we have of the economy ....The reason is relatively straightforward. To make economic comparisons across time, we need some device -- call it a deflator -- to put things on a consistent scale ....Pearlstein gives examples of two sets of improbable scenarios -- one derived from downwardly revising the CPI and the other from believing in the current CPI -- and suggestions from several economists ....He says that some economists point out that one reason we find ourselves in the midst of this somewhat technical statistical muddle is that the CPI is being used as something for which it was never intended -- namely, a cost-of-living index. All of the blind spots within the CPI have been well known for many years. But, fixing them requires bringing in all sort of subjective judgments that economists are not uniquely qualified to make .... A Washington Post editorial, "The President and the COLAs," calls on the President to announce his support for a reduction in the annual cost-of-living adjustments that cause Social Security benefits to move marginally up each year while holding income taxes down ....One paragraph says, "He ought to add that, in the process, we should neither tamper nor appear to be tampering with the consumer price index or any other measure of inflation published by the government. The official inflation estimate should neither be, nor be suspected of being, the result of political pressure or political decrees. Rather than lean on the Bureau of Labor Statistics to change the measure and take the heat, we should have the courage ourselves to make more selective use of it and defend what would be our altogether defensible decision to the voters ...." Writing on the op.ed. page of the Washington Post, Robert J. Samuelson in "Starbucks and the CPI" says that a flawed index makes it harder for us to read the past and plan for the future ....Samuelson writes that the "reaction to the report has predictably focused on the budget ....But the Boskin report's larger significance is that it demolishes the theory that living standards have stagnated" .....He also says, "The fact that the CPI isn't perfect doesn't mean that it can be instantly improved. No single statistic will ever exactly measure inflation, because there are too many products whose prices change too often and whose quality variations -- for worse as well as better -- can never be completely counted." BLS "disputes some of the commission estimates; there's room for disagreement. The worst response to the report would be for the White House and Congress to pressure the BLS to alter the CPI. The BLS is studying improvements, but if it's stampeded into adopting only those that lower inflation, we could end up with a less useful indictor -- one, for example, that masks some price increases ....Slashing the adjustment at least 0.5 percentage points (say, from 3 percent to 2.5 percent) is justified for five years until we see how the BLS alters the CPI ...." In a series of articles in the October issue of the Monthly Labor Review, BLS analysts provide demographic and economic profiles of four types of alternative job arrangements: independent contractors, temporary-help-agency workers, contract-company workers, and on-call workers. One article, by BLS economist Sharon R. Cohany, describes each of the arrangements in detail, offering definitions as well as estimates of workers in each category. BLS plans to update its information on contingent work and alternative jobs by conducting another survey in February 1997, says bureau economist Thomas Nardone. He says it remains to be seen how often the survey will be done, as it depends in part on results of next year's polling ....(Daily Labor Report, pages 1,A-10,E-3). The most up-to-date national figures on job-related illnesses and injuries will be delayed from their scheduled annual release in December to March 1997, partly because of disruptions caused earlier this year by government furloughs and shutdowns, BLS officials told BNA. Those disruptions occurred as BLS and the states were collecting the data for injuries and illnesses suffered in 1995, according to William Weber, BLS's acting assistant commissioner of occupational safety and health. The delay will mean BLS will be releasing its survey results in 1997 as much as two years after the injuries and illnesses occurred ....BLS officials said the government shutdowns and furloughs postponed the survey approximately one month, but that the bureau's own systems development improvements are also partly to blame for the delay ....(Daily Labor Report, page A-10). A chart using BLS figures on repetitive stress injuries is featured in an article on the possible effect of a New York jury's award of damages to three women who said they were injured by repeatedly using their computer keyboards (Washington Post, page C13). The country's purchasing executives are optimistic about the economy for 1997 with expectations of higher revenues compared with 1996 and optimistic forecasts on manufacturing employment, the National Association of Purchasing Management announced ....(Daily Labor Report, page A-11). Relatively high spending on education is paying off in the United States, but the disparities between the highly educated and the poorly educated remain high, according to an educational survey by the OECD ....With more than 32 percent of the population finishing at least one stage of higher education, the U.S. ranks second across the OECD, trailing only Canada in the overall university attendance rate. Even more importantly, university graduates in the U.S. make the transition to full-time work faster than in other OECD countries and are less likely to be unemployed later in life ....(Daily Labor Report, page A-3). Joseph E. Stiglitz, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has told President Clinton that he is leaving the administration to become the top economist at the World Bank ....(Washington Post, page C14; New York Times, page D2). DUE OUT TOMORROW: Consumer Price Index -- November 1996 Real Earning: November 1996