From the Atlantic: The Zombie Numbers That Rule the U.S. Economy

In 2305 we looked briefly at the budgeting process and will also look at economic policy making soon enough. Both make use of numbers that purport to tell us how the economy is doing - but here's a suggestion that those numbers are misleading.

- Click here for the article:

We act as if they are markers from time immemorial, but in fact they were invented for modern industrial nations after the Depression and World War II and are now seriously outdated.

Take gross domestic product. Derived from formulas set down by the economist Simon Kuznets and others in the 1930s, its limitations have long been recognized, none more eloquently than by Robert F. Kennedy in a famous speech in 1968 when he declared that it measured everything except that which is worth measuring.

GDP treats all output as a positive. When you buy LED lights that obviate the need to spend on incandescent bulbs and reduce energy consumption, GDP goes down and what should be an unmitigated good becomes a statistical negative. If a coal company pollutes a river, the cleanup costs are positive for GDP, as are any health care costs for those harmed.

What’s more, we have also come to assume that with output comes more spending and employment, but factories today are powered by robotics and software, and robots don’t buy more lattes and shoes.

GDP is a good number for a nation that produces lots of stuff made by lots of workers, but for an information economy grounded in services and intellectual property and awash in apps that cost nothing yet enable commerce, it is not up to the task. Nor are many of our indicators. Our trade figures treat an iPhone made—more accurately, assembled—in China with no reference to the intellectual property created by Apple in California.

From Wonkblog: Everything you need to know about Chained CPI in one post

Here's a great opening:

Here is a sentence you won’t hear politicians or policy wonks saying in the next few weeks: “We should pay Social Security beneficiaries less in the future and push a lot of people into higher tax brackets.” Here is a sentence you almost certainly will hear: “Let’s adopt chained CPI.”

Welcome to the dark art of obscurantist deficit reduction. Of course, the only ways to cut the deficit are by increasing tax revenue (either through higher rates, fewer deductions, or faster growth) or cutting spending. But both of those methods are unpopular. So, to get any support for their plans, politicians who insist on cutting the deficit have to find ways to cut spending or raise taxes that don’t look like they’re doing just that. Perhaps the most popular option along these lines is adopting “chained CPI.”

Then the author decribes the different ways inflation can be measured and the struggle over which to apply to Social Security:

Here’s how it works: Numerous government programs, most notably Social Security benefits and the income thresholds for tax brackets, are indexed for inflation. But inflation can be measured in a number of ways. The tax code, for instance, uses CPI-U (Consumer Price Index – Urban), which measures prices for consumers in urban areas, to adjust the income cutoffs for different tax brackets. Social Security uses CPI-W, which is like CPI-U but only counts prices paid by urban wage-earners, not all consumers.

Various deficit-reduction frameworks, including Bowles-Simpson, Domenici-Rivlin and the Gang of Six plan, would convert all programs using CPI-U or CPI-W to a third measure — called C-CPI-U, or chained CPI. Most inflation measures, including CPI-U and CPI-W, track the price of a certain basket of goods. That basket could include, say, a year’s supply of propane. When propane costs go up, CPI-U and CPI-W include that as an increase in the cost of living.

But some people would just stop using propane if its price went up. They’d switch to electric heating, or a geothermal system, or a wood stove. So their actual heating costs wouldn’t go up as much as CPI-U and CPI-W would suggest. Chained CPI attempts to take “substitution effects” like this into account. Thus, its number generally rises more slowly than other metrics.