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 "Hedonic adjustment" and misleading government data |
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dejavu
头衔: 海归少校
声望: 学员
加入时间: 2004/02/20
文章: 148
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作者：dejavu 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
The following article excerpt is from Barron's Online,
warning: Inflation is really higher than what the government is trying to make you believe.
"All of which leads us to the latest ruminations of Pimco's William Gross, our newest Roundtable addition, which offer some very relevant and worthwhile comments on inflation, the measuring sticks the government uses to measure it and the resulting impact on reported GDP. Not to keep you in suspense, Bill is not entirely taken with the way Uncle Sam calculates the rate of inflation, as you might possibly glean from his labeling it a "con job." He has particularly unpleasant things to say about such artifacts of the fudge factory as " hedonic adjustment" and "substitution bias," absurdities that in a modest fashion we've railed against at one time or another.
For those who have remained innocent of such vile practices, Bill explains substitution bias is a maneuver executed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that follows "your preference for Chicken McNuggets vs. a Quarter Pounder." More specifically, the reasoning here by the BLS is that when the price of beef rises you happily switch to chicken and, contrariwise, when the price of chicken rises, you can simply go back to beef. For someone who finds a medium rare T-bone the epitome of culinary nirvana, the suggestion that a chicken wing is just as good, is pure sacrilege. But that repugnant hypothesis keeps meat prices (or any other kindred item amenable to substitution) nicely subdued and the Consumer Price Index beguilingly tame.
Hedonic adjustment, as Bill observes, is based on the innovative notion that "if the quality of a product got better over the past 12 months" then it really didn't go up in price and "in fact, it may have actually gone down." By way of example, he cites the price of desktop and notebook computers, which in the real world declined by 8% a year over the past decade. Because computer power and memory have improved, however, the hedonically adjusted price of the machines dropped by 25% a year since 1997. Need we say such hedonic magic has performed wonders in keeping the core Consumer Price Index numbers in check ("core," in case you're wondering, excludes such uninteresting items as food and energy)?
Bill points out that hedonic adjustments are a relatively recent phenomena, introduced "to buttress Greenspan's concept of our New Age Economy." They have grown like Topsy to encompass consumer-electronic stuff, appliances, even college textbooks, until no less than 46% of the weight of the CPI is subject to such adjustments.
He remarks that the dubious reckonings may serve Mr. Greenspan well, but by falsely suppressing the real rate of inflation they do serious disservice to all manner of decent folks, including recipients of Social Security and private pensioners as well, whose monthly checks are pegged to the cost of living; to buyers and holders of TIPS -- inflation protected securities -- and, for that matter, all owners of Treasury obligations, who are deceived into thinking "they're earning a real return over and above inflation."
The bottom line, Bill says, is the CPI is probably something like 1% higher than the official data would have it, and that means, obviously, that GDP is correspondingly 1% lower. Consumers, in truth, have been paying more than they are led to believe, savers are getting less of a return than they think and the economy has been growing with appreciably less vigor.
A kindly soul deep down, Bill adds that none of this may be "a conspiracy, but it's definitely a con job foisted on an unwitting public by government officials who choose to look the other way or who convince themselves that they are fostering some logical adjustment in a New Age Economy dependent on the markets and not the marketplace for its survival."
作者：dejavu 在 海归商务 发贴, 来自【海归网】 http://www.haiguinet.com
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 "Hedonic adjustment" and misleading government data -- dejavu - (3855 Byte) 2004-10-03 周日, 04:43 (558 reads)
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