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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bart13 who wrote (91334)	2/6/2008 3:07:28 PM
From: Oblomov	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 110194

OK, thanks. Stigler and the other Commission members thought it would be useful for CPI to be a cost of living index (COLI). Despite the fact that Stigler was of the Chicago school, the elites of the day had a sanguine belief in technocratic approaches to perceived social and economic problems. The CPI in its new form as a COLI would in principle aid policymakers in adjusting the economy to optimal levels of production and consumption, or whatever. And it would give the munificent administrators of the still-new welfare state a way to measure the effect of policy on households. This, of course, is how it was supposed to work in theory. Central planning seldom works as intended, and poverty is a lot more complex than households lacking enough money. But such was the sociological optimism of the technocratic elite in the early 1960s. I think that there might have been some fudging here and there prior to 1965 or so, but that the statistical manipulations began in earnest under Johnson and expanded further under Nixon. By the mid-1970s, the gap between an honest accounting and the reported numbers was so great that it became imperative to continue the obfuscation.