ravi wrote:
I am afraid I do not understand your anger. That people are honest,
competent and serious (or that their processes are open) does not
exclude the influence of ideology or theory. Are you saying that Leigh
is wrong because:
(a) the numbers do not come from politically influenced government sources?
[OR]
(b) that they are thoroughly vetted in some way by those analysing/using
them? If so, how?
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.
Doug
