The reliability of government figures

Argentina takes the easy and straightforward approach to reducing inflation:

Since 2007, when Guillermo Moreno, the secretary of internal trade, was sent into the statistics institute, INDEC, to tell its staff that their figures had better not show inflation shooting up, prices and the official record have parted ways. Private-sector economists and statistical offices of provincial governments show inflation two to three times higher than INDEC’s number (which only covers greater Buenos Aires). Unions, including those from the public sector, use these independent estimates when negotiating pay rises. Surveys by Torcuato di Tella University show inflation expectations running at 25-30%.
PriceStats, a specialist provider of inflation rates which produces figures for 19 countries that are published by State Street, a financial services firm, puts the annual rate at 24.4% and cumulative inflation since the beginning of 2007 at 137%. INDEC says that the current rate is only 9.7%, and that prices have gone up a mere 44% over that period (see chart).

INDEC seems to arrive at its figures by a pick-and-mix process of tweaking, sophistry and sheer invention. Graciela Bevacqua, the professional statistician responsible for the consumer-price index (CPI) until Mr Moreno forced her out, says that he tried to get her to omit decimal points, not round them. That sounds minor—until you calculate that a 1% monthly inflation rate works out at an annual 12.7%, whereas 1.9% monthly compounds to 25.3%.

Threatening letters sent by the government to independent economists also shed light on INDEC’s methods. One was told that since the cost of domestic service was “a wage, not a price”, he should not have included it in his CPI calculations. “They have put a lot of effort and lawyers into such arguments,” he says.

What is remarkable is that one can quite reasonably rationalize this exercise in statistical fiction under the economic doctrine of “rational expectations”, which is the insane neoclassical idea that it’s not an increase in the money supply or debt outstanding or even a change in the level of prices that matters, but rather the expectation of future price changes on the part of consumers. So, if the government simply adjusts those expectations downward by lying about the current rate of inflation, then the subsequent behavior of consumers will cause prices to fall in line with those expectations regardless of how much the government ends up actually printing or borrowing.

Wikipedia reports this interesting fact about the concept: “Chicago economists applied rational expectations to other areas in economics like finance, which produced the influential efficient market hypothesis.” The EMH, it should be needless to say, has turned out to be a complete and utter flop, as demonstrated by Robert Prechter and numerous others using a wide variety of means.

What I find rather amusing about this article from The Economist is the clear implication that it is only an Argentine tactic and other government agencies, such as the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis in the United States, have not been playing exactly the same game for decades. Of course, as those who have read RGD will know, U.S. statisticians have been continually devising new and “improved” versions of CPI, each of which purports to show “true” inflation while methodically lopping off various sectors of the economy that are showing price changes such as those “volatile food and energy” sectors.

Consider this. The entire rise-and-fall in housing prices have had no effect whatsoever on U.S. CPI despite the fact that according to the latest statistics, $69.5 billion new home sales and $756.7 billion in existing home sales take place every year, representing around 5.5% of the $15 trillion in transactions that make up reported U.S. GDP.

Team Calvin: Question One

Three weeks ago, in response to the idea that we non-Calvinists were as prone to contortionism as I accused the Calvinists of being, I offered The Calvinist Challenge, in which I asked Team Calvin to produce the five most difficult questions they could devise in order to determine whether or not I would be forced to resort to similar contortions of Scripture in my responses.  Nine of the planet’s finest Calvinist minds busily occupied themselves with concocting more than 30 questions, and after an intense series of debate during which charges of heresy were hurled back and forth and Markku narrowly escaped the fiery fate of Michael Servetus, they finally settled upon five of them. Here is the first question, followed by my response.

AA. Vox: Is this paragraph something you could write and agree with? If not please make it something you agree with, while editing, changing and deleting as few words as possible.

The God I worship is probably not aware of much of what is happening on earth today. You should not tell a child that God has a plan for her, because not only does He not know which husband will be right for her in twenty years, He doesn’t even know that she will be alive tomorrow. And it’s quite possible that if she does die, he will not be aware of it. If on the other hand she lives through an accident in which the car is totaled, thanking God for protecting her may be giving him credit for something he didn’t do. It is quite possible that my God knows less about your daughter than you do. To find out what is happening somewhere on earth, my God has to do research (or, if you like, “go and see”) to find out about it. My God most likely doesn’t have enough knowledge about me and my soul to know what I will do in a given circumstance.

No. The edited version that is consistent with my beliefs is as follows:

The God I worship is not necessarily aware of everything that is happening on Earth today. You should not tell a child that God has a specific plan made just for her, because not only is it possible that He does not know which husband she will choose in twenty years, He doesn’t necessarily know that she will be alive tomorrow. And it’s quite possible that if she does die, He will not be immediately aware of it. If, on the other hand, she lives through an accident in which the car is totaled, thanking God for protecting her may be giving Him credit for something He didn’t do or even intend. It is even possible that God knows less about your daughter’s current activities than you do at the moment. To find out what is happening somewhere on Earth, God customarily investigates Himself or instructs others to find out about it and inform Him. However, due to God’s knowledge of human nature and the human heart, He most likely has sufficient knowledge about me and my soul to know what I will do in any given circumstance.

Hypergamouse is back

The second in the weekly comic strip is now up at Alpha Game.

And on a tangentially related subject, I address a HUS commenter’s failure to grasp that ego simply does not apply in the same manner across the sexual divide:

“Maybe we [women] just don’t like [male] sluts for the same reason men don’t, which can be attributed to “ego” as well. Why is that so hard for some people to comprehend?”

“There are four reasons. First, women are notoriously bad at understanding and communicating why they do what they do. Second, because women very much like sexually experienced men, so much so that they observably harbor a vast preference for them over sexually inexperienced men. Women outright mock men who “can’t get laid”, so much so that they regularly resort to such insults even in cases where it manifestly doesn’t apply. If a woman is calling a man “a slut” or some similar term normally directed at women, she is usually revealing an amount of jealousy as well as her own willingness to have sex with him….”

There are few examples of the gulf between female consciousness and female action more readily apparent than with the common female claim to be disgusted and put-off by male sexual experience. But as last week’s Hypergamouse illustrated, taking female advice concerning female behavior tends to be one of the more effective means of ensuring failure with women.

WND column

The Limits of Freedom

It is both fascinating and frightening to be given insight into the thought processes that go into major foreign policy decisions such as the invasion and occupation of Iraq. Consider the basic flaws that are revealed in this single paragraph, beginning with the very first sentence. When in history, one wonders, has the removal of a tyrannical leader ever obligated those responsible for the removal to remake a nation’s entire system of government? And even if we accept this obligation, what is the basis for claiming that the revamped system of government must be a democratic one, especially if one considers that the elaborate structure which was imposed upon the Iraqi people is not only not a democracy, but was expressly designed to limit the free expression of their will on the basis of ethnic and religious identities?

Short-sighted secular aggression

Mario Loyola juxtaposes two Obama administration actions:

So the president refuses to apologize for forcing Catholics to violate their religious beliefs or pay a tax penalty. But he immediately apologizes because a few of our soldiers inadvertently violated Muslims religious beliefs by trying to dispose of already-desecrated Korans.

Well, despite his apology, hoardes of semi-barbarian Afghans went on a rampage, burned Obama in dog-head effigy, and killed several of our soldiers.

And if you think that’s bad, just imagine what they would do if Obama adopted a rule forcing Muslims to violate their religious beliefs or pay a tax penalty.

Of course, even if there is considerable resistance to any such rule, secular enthusiasts will be comfortable knowing they will be able to rely upon the judicial system to protect them from violent protests of the law’s new expanse, right?

Wait a minute….

That’s an easy one

English Actress Louise Brealey has a request: “I’d like every man who doesn’t call himself a feminist to explain to the women in his life why he doesn’t believe in equality for women.”

No problem at all. I don’t believe in equality for women for exactly the same reason I don’t believe in free unicorn rides for women. I note that equality does not exist in any material, scientific, historical, legal, or religious sense. I further note that the mere attempt to bring about this nonexistent state has massively violated human liberties and had a materially negative effect on women throughout the West by a wide variety of metrics.

Now allow me to turn the question around on Miss Brealey and anyone else who believes in equality for women. Why do you claim to believe in something that provably and manifestly does not exist and has never existed?

Mailvox: of bovine flatulence

I found this attempt to criticize the blog to be more than a little amusing, particularly in light of some recent discussions:

The whole website is one giant Straw Man. He makes entirely false claims of what secularists believe and then demolishes those, rather than bothering to listen to what they are actually saying. It’s rather like my saying “all conservatives believe that the moon is made of blue cheese” then producing proof that it isn’t. Any moron can do that – your man is a pompous buffoon, with grandiose overblown views of his own intellectual prowess.

The site is also littered with factual errors. For instance in the piece about the CERN experiments , he firstly demonstrates a complete miss-understanding of scientific method, before completely miss-understanding the relevance of the possible faulty connector. (In fact if the connector does prove to be faulty that would make the neutrinos faster, rather than slower as he seems to think.) There are other possible sources of error in the experiment, but the connector isn’t the issue that would bring the speed below light speed.

So in summary, it’s the perfect website for the modern conservative American. It has an overblown sense of its own importance and intellectual capabilities, and busies itself debates points that its opponents haven’t actually made. It’s like a blog version of Rush Limbaugh.

First, I should like to invite Purple Cow to “make entirely true claims of what secularists believe” so that he need not fear I am attacking any straw men in lieu of the correct targets. This is, of course, a blatant falsehood, and more than that, it is one habitually thrown out by many members of the godless Left whenever they wish to avoid having the errors in their arguments exposed in public. Longtime readers will recall that a number of TIA critics tried to make precisely the same Appeal to Nonexistent Strawmen despite the fact that I was directly addressing explicit arguments, complete with quotes, citations, and page numbers, that had been presented by the various individuals being criticized. This is the customary process:

1. Secularist 1 presents argument.
2. I demolish S1’s argument.
3. I later make reference to S1’s argument in rhetorical form.
4. Secularist 2 claims I am attacking secularist strawmen.
5. I invite S2 to present his argument.

6a. *crickets*
6b. S2 presents the same argument as S1.

I further note that this sort of response is precisely why I continue to publicly drive home the undeniable statistical probability of my superior intelligence, because the likes of the Purple Cow almost inevitably attempt to challenge it on the basis of absolutely nothing but an unconvincing pose of self-appointed intellectual superiority. This example is particularly amusing, because Purple Cow clearly didn’t even understand the rather important distinction between what I wrote about the CERN experiment and what I quoted ScienceInsider writing about it. [Hint: if it’s blue text in a white box, then I probably didn’t write it.] Purple Cow’s complaints about the “miss-understanding” of the scientific method and the “miss-understanding” of “the relevance of the possible faulty connector” simply don’t apply to me because I never said anything about either.

Moreover, Purple Cow clearly failed to understand that my point about the intrinsic unreliability of science and its consequent poor utility as a means of providing technocratic guidance to political governance, (and, of course, its ultimate reliance on the IT department), is valid regardless of what the effect of the faulty connector might have on the experiment. Purple Cow is yet another excellent example of the mid-wit who erroneously assumes that because he is more intelligent than the average 100-IQ individual, he therefore must have correctly grasped that which is clearly and incontrovertibly over his head.

I should also like to point out that contra the oft-heard Appeal to Nonexistent Strawmen, this is one of the only blogs of which I am aware in which contrary arguments presented by critics are published in full, unedited. So, I think it is not only false, but wildly dishonest, to claim that I avoid, in any way, the best arguments possessed by those who disagree with me.

Scientific Dilbertism

Remember, this is the very process by which most secularists believe society should be governed:

The CERN particle physics laboratory in Geneva has confirmed Wednesday’s report that a loose fiber-optic cable may be behind measurements that seemed to show neutrinos outpacing the speed of light. But the lab also says another glitch could have caused the experiment to underestimate the particles’ speed.

In a statement based on an earlier press release from the OPERA collaboration, CERN said two possible “effects” may have influenced the anomalous measurements. One of them, due to a possible faulty connection between the fiber-optic cable bringing the GPS signals to OPERA and the detector’s master clock, would have caused the experiment to underestimate the neutrinos’ flight time, as described in the original story. The other effect concerns an oscillator, part of OPERA’s particle detector that gives its readings time stamps synchronized to GPS signals. Researchers think correcting for an error in this device would actually increase the anomaly in neutrino velocity, making the particles even speedier than the earlier measurements seemed to show.

What is clear from all of this is that the scientists and science fetishists fantasizing of a technocratic dictatorship that will usher in the shiny, sexy, science fiction, seculatopia of their dreams haven’t realized is that their totalitarian vision will ultimately be a dictatorship of the IT department.

Diverse applications

One of the remarkable shared idiocies of the left and right alike is their staunch refusal to understand that immigrants from foreign cultures will not only retain many of their traditions from their former societies, but will view Western traditions through their own cultural lens and will therefore tend to expand Western customs in various ways not always anticipated:

Dr Vincent Argent, who previously worked for the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and is now a GP and consultant obstetrician and gynaecologist, said he had “no doubt” that women were terminating pregnancies because of the sex of the baby and that he believed the practice was “fairly widespread”. This week The Daily Telegraph disclosed that women were being offered illegal abortions by doctors on the basis of the gender of the foetus.

Dr Argent said there were “an awful lot of covert abortions for sex selection going on” where women would have a scan or blood test to find out the sex, then ask for a termination without telling the doctor the real reason…. Dr Argent also disclosed that he believed that some colleagues had arranged terminations relating to the sex of the foetus and they felt it was reasonable to do so.

“I’ve had a consultant colleague in the North who expressed a view — that consultant was from an ethnic minority … He didn’t think it was ethically wrong because he thought that the cultural reason why some communities may prefer to have four male babies is as good a reason as the, if you like, the Anglo-Saxon cultural view, ‘Well I’m pregnant, I just don’t want it anyway.’”

Of course, they are absolutely right. If abortion is morally and legally acceptable, it is acceptable for any reason. In fact, there is no moral or legal reason why people shouldn’t offer financial incentive to encourage undesirable populations to obtain abortions. The federal government could even require abortions of all minority populations for those choosing to apply for welfare payments and there would be no logical or moral reason to oppose any such policy.

The disappearance of children with Down’s Syndrome is largely the result of abortion and pre-natal testing. So, we can anticipate that the more immigration that takes place into the West, the more the male-female ratios will come to resemble those in India and China.

The chickens begin to roost

Many will find this latest innovation in American law to be an upsetting or ominous development. I simply find it to be an entirely predictable and tremendously amusing one:

I have made a transcript of the Pennsylvania case in which state judge Mark Martin, a Muslim convert and U.S. Army reservist who served in Iraq, relied on a sharia law defense (as well as some evidentiary contortions) to dismiss an open-and-shut harassment case against a Muslim man who assaulted an atheist activist at a Halloween parade.

The victim, Ernest Perce, wore a “Zombie Mohammed” costume and pretended to walk among the dead (in the company of an associate who was the “Zombie Pope” — and who, you’ll be shocked to learn, was not assaulted). The assailant, Talag Elbayomy, a Muslim immigrant, physically attacked Perce, attempted to pull his sign off, and, according to police, admitted what he had done right after the incident. The defense argued that Elbayomy believed it was a crime to insult the prophet Mohammed (it is, under sharia law), and that because he was in the company of his children, he had to act to end this provocation and set an example about defending Islam.

As you will see, Judge Martin did not lecture the defendant about free speech or how disputes are resolved in a civilized country. He instead dressed the victim down for failing to appreciate how sensitive Muslims — including the judge himself — are about Islam.

Liberals and atheists have methodically waged war against Christianity while simultaneously attempting to limit free speech through enforcing politically correct sensitivity and free association through anti-discrimination laws. Apparently they never stopped to think that others were perfectly capable of learning from their example, others who are far more numerous, ruthless, and dedicated to their cause.

I believe it is now time for Western Christians and non-Christians alike to acknowledge that men such as Alexis de Tocqueville were correct and various concepts such as free expression, freedom of association, and other hallowed concepts of Western civilization simply do not translate outside of Western Christian culture. What was once theoretical is now empirical thanks to more than sixty years of evidence that strongly suggests conventional Western views of human liberty are simply not compatible with non-Christian, non-Western cultures.

For example, the concept of freedom of religion only functioned reasonably well so long as it was applied to a range of Christian denominations with a structural tendency to resist control by the state. It can no more be successfully applied to religious and quasi-religious belief systems that are closely intertwined with the state such as secular humanism, socialist atheism, or Islam than democracy can successfully encompass the participation of ideological parties devoted to communism, national socialism, or hereditary monarchy. This will, of course, fly in the face of many individual’s ideals, including my own, but observable reality has to trump the Platonic Forms when one is addressing practical public policy.

This doesn’t mean sacrificing any principles, quite to the contrary, it simply means ordering them in terms of their priority. And the primary principle of any Western society should be maximizing net human liberty within a structurally sound society capable of sustaining itself.