Boskin Commission

The Boskin Commission, formally the Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index, was established in 1995 by U.S. Senators Bob Packwood and Daniel Moynihan, with the ostensible mandate to examine the accuracy of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which is a measure of inflation. The commission concluded in its 1996 report that the CPI overstated inflation by about 1.1 percentage points annually.

Eric Weinstein claims that the Boskin Commission was essentially a covert operation to manipulate the Consumer Price Index (CPI) in order to justify cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits and raising taxes.

Specifically, Eric claims:

• The Boskin Commission, driven by senators Moynihan and Packwood who selected a small team of five economists (including Dale Jorgenson, Michael Boskin, Ellen Dulberger, Robert Gordon, and Zvi Griliches), set out to find an “overstatement” in the CPI.
• The commission’s true goal was to engineer a 1.1% CPI overstatement, which would result in a trillion-dollar reduction in government outlays over 10 years.
• To achieve this, the team allegedly split into two groups, each coming up with partial inflation numbers (like 0.5% and 0.6%) that added up to the 1.1% figure they needed—an approach that amounted to enormously consequential academic malpractice.
• Eric Weinstein and his wife and collaborator, Pia Malaney, (who was then a graduate student in the Harvard economics department) were directly engaged with closely related mathematical and economic problems—using advanced methods like gauge theory to tackle the real issue of how to measure cost-of-living changes. In contrast, the Boskin Commission wasn’t actually trying to solve the problem of accurate inflation measurement. Instead, it was a politically motivated operation designed to produce a 1.1% overstatement in the Consumer Price Index (CPI) to justify cutting Social Security and Medicare by a trillion dollars over 10 years. Weinstein and Malaney's work stood directly in the way of this agenda.
• The Boskin Commission's conclusion was not an innocent error or technical oversight, but rather a deliberate manipulation—academic malpractice carried out at scale by powerful Harvard economists who rigged the numbers to meet a political target.
• This was a “perfect crime” that manipulated technical economic data to shift wealth away from retirees and the vulnerable, calling it “the greatest theft in modern American history.” Because it was buried under a mountain of economic jargon and complexity, it was almost impossible for the public—or even many economists—to grasp or object to what had really happened. The manipulation was shielded from scrutiny not only by the technicality of the subject matter, but also by the immense prestige and power of the people involved. As a result, even though it had massive real-world effects—cutting trillions of dollars in benefits—most people, including many economists, were unaware or unwilling to challenge the story.
• The effects of this manipulation continue to this day, with trillions of dollars lost, while the truth remains largely unspoken because of the reputations and entanglements of those involved.
• This wasn’t just about economic data—it was about enforcing intellectual control. In academia and economics, those who challenge these kinds of manipulations risk professional destruction. There is an unethical destruction of colleagues—a culture of silencing and punishing dissenters to protect certain interests. This combination of intellectual intimidation and technical obfuscation has allowed this act of academic theft to go unchallenged and ignored for decades, despite its enormous consequences.

Quotes

Eric Weinstein: Harvard is two separate structures fused together. One is about power, and one is about achievement. And the two of them are interlinked in a way that cannot be separated. Without the achievement, Harvard wouldn't have this kind of glowing reputation that causes us to sort of una over a history. Without the power, it wouldn't be able to attract the money, and it wouldn't be able to constantly position itself. So through achievement, it gets enough cachet to wield power; through the power, it gets the resources to buy achievement. And this sort of thing is not understood. And I've been on both sides of this thing. Like, one of the things that happened was that the Boskin Commission, in 1996, tried to figure out how to cut social security and raise taxes without getting caught, because that's the third rail of politics. And what they said is if we change the CPI, the Consumer Price Index (the way we measure inflation), because tax brackets are indexed, and because entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare indexed, if we claim that inflation is overstated by 1.1 percentage points, we will gain a trillion dollars in savings. And the public won't be able to object to it, because we're gonna be just adjusting a dial. We're gonna say that this dial was broken, and we got some technocrats to fix it. So they figured out, we want to get a trillion dollars over 10 years, they backed out that that would require 1.1% overstatement. They broke into two teams, one team came up with 0.5, one team came up with 0.6, O.5 plus 0.6 equals 1.1. Totally fictitious. They got a proposal for a trillion dollars that they were going to steal, effectively, from Social Security.

Joe Rogan: And they described this action publicly?

Eric Weinstein: Robert Gordon, who is one of the five Boskin Commissioners—Jamie, could you bring up something called "Boskin, Wild versus Mild"? They brag about these things. Power wants to explain just how powerful it is. And—do you remember the scene in The Big Short, where they're talking to these guys in Florida and saying, "Why are they confessing?" And somebody says "they're not confessing, they're bragging"? It's a question of, what are you proud that you're able to do? So until Robert Gordon did this PowerPoint presentation, we did not understand what happened to the work that I did with my wife in economics, which is that we were trying to show how you could actually compute the Consumer Price Index objectively, using gauge theory. The same year, they were trying to figure out, how do we steal a trillion dollars over 10 years by doing funny games with the gauge, called inflation ... "Dale said 1.1% implies 1 trillion in Social Security savings over 10 years. Somehow our separate efforts came up with the 1.1% bias number." In other words, they came up with the target, which is, let's save a trillion dollars. And then they came up with, we have to say it's overstated by 1.1. "We then broke into two groups and "somehow," keyword, we put the numbers together and we got the target. This is academic malpractice practice in the absolute extreme. When Harvard was doing that it was acting in its power capacity. And the way they did it was they buried what I think is probably the best work in 25 to 50 years in mathematical economics, that happened in the Harvard economics department, which is a second so-called "Marginal Revolution", where we change the calculus underneath all of economic theory.

Joe Rogan: So how does something like this happen? Is there a concerted effort, do they get together and they have this idea of, this is how we're going to do it?

Eric Weinstein: They have a five-person commission behind closed doors that meets at the cousin's house of somebody on the commission in Florida—in an another presentation they say "we solved this at the kitchen table of my cousin's house in Florida". And you're thinking like, okay, so it's five guys—Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat and a Republican, got together to pick five economists who are willing to play the dirty game. The dirty game broke into two teams, they knew exactly what they had to do. They found the results to put them together, to put in front of Congress, to put in front of the National Academy.

- Eric Weinstein and Joe Rogan, April 2, 2021, on JRE 1628

I need a president who understands why the CPI was broken by two senators named Moynihan and Packwood in the mid 1990s, using five academics, including Zvi Griliches, Dale Jorgensen, Ellen [Dulberger], Robert Gordon, and Michael Boskin. Who the hell is the Boskin Commission? Why are we not revisiting chained indices, seasonal adjustments, looped preferences, unstable preference? Trillions of dollars go back and forth over this. I've been trying to talk about this since the 1990s. You can't talk to anyone about the fact that the CPI was used to raise taxes and slash benefits, because tax brackets are indexed to it, and Social Security and Medicare indexed. I mean, you know, it's like a perfect crime. You're stealing trillions of dollars. Everybody's experiencing higher prices. It's not being reflected in the gauge. And you can't get into the game to have the conversation because anyone who's an expert is compromised.

- Eric Weinstein, Nov 3, 2024, on The Winston Marshall Show #033

You have a small number of economists who, in the mid 90s, became directed by Bob Packwood and Daniel Moynihan to find an overstatement of the CPI, because tax brackets were indexed, and entitlement benefits, social security, medicare were indexed. And so what they found is if you could knock down the measurement of the CPI, you could raise taxes and slash benefits. And they backed out that 1.1% overstatement, if corrected, would lead to a trillion dollar savings over 10 years. And they actually broke into two groups to come up with two separate numbers that would add together to 1.1, which to me is academic malpractice. That is, they started with the target—and this is according to one of their own members of this Boskin Commission, Professor Gordon, who talked about the fact that "somehow" the two groups came up with the two numbers, which, when added together, gave Dale Jorgensen, a Harvard professor of economics, his 1.1% overstatement. And that's what they went with. Now, to me, that's like saying, "we need to find an error in all the temperature gauges so that we can come up with different targets because global warming is a problem." You're not allowed to touch the temperature gauges, for God's sakes!

- Eric Weinstein, Dec 16, 2019, on The Portal Ep. 16: Tyler Cowen - The Revolution Will Not Be Marginalized

Let me explain the previous slide of Boskin Commissioner Prof. Robert Gordon in plain English.

Harvard’s Samuel W. Morris Professor Dale Jorgenson told the Boskin Commission (created by the senators) that to shave an even one TRiLLION dollars ($1,000,000,000,000) off of social security payments they would merely need to justify an oddly specific 1.1% overstatement in the consumer price index.

Which they did. “Somehow”.

“Somehow” involved destroying anyone who said “CPI doesn’t work like that at all! It’s not a number you can dial to get consequences you like.”

- Eric Weinstein, April 15, 2025, on X

I do something different with women in the workplace with respect to trying to figure out what is unfair to them, because there are things that are very unfair to them. And one of the things I do is to say, tell me about the great ideas of females and the great contributions that are sitting there on the table, in part because they had a female discover, right? So you could look at, you know, Vera Rubin's work which never, you know, never got a Nobel Prize, everybody knows about it in astrophysics. But I went through one of these things with my wife, where we did this thing with gauge theory and economics in the Harvard economics department. And I think it was one of the most sensational breakthroughs in mathematical and bedrock economic theory in the last 25 years. And I'll just be very clear, every time people want to figure out how to tax Americans more and cut their benefits, without paying the price of touching the so called third rails of politics, they realize that the CPI indexes—both tax receipts and entitlements, so payments like Social Security and Medicare, and if you can show that the CPI is overstated, then the idea is that you get to take in more tax revenue and you get to pay old people and sick people less. And so it's a very popular game in Washington to gerrymander the measurement. Now the two ways that you do that. One is that you go from a fixed basket where you have, let's say, basketballs and glasses, and you figure out what the price of that basket is over time, to something which is, what is the utility. So the idea is maybe I want slightly more glasses or basketball—you could do with coffee and tea, I'm willing to trade off some amount of coffee for some amount of tea to get my caffeine fix if there's a problem or a bumper crop in Brazil. Okay. The other thing you do is that you keep updating these baskets, and that's called chaining. Well, you can't do both of those things together. Because there's a presumed impossibility result that you can't have a true cost of a chained cost of living index, except that my wife and I solved that problem in the mid 1990s, at the same time that the Boskin Commission was trying to back out an exact 1.1% overstatement because that would save a trillion dollars. So in other words, you have to understand they weren't given the task, go find a 1.1% overstatement and justify it so that we can cut benefits and raise taxes. And my wife got in the middle of that bank robbery as it was being attempted, and so she got thwacked. Now I wanted to fight these sons of bitches, absolutely. In particular, there was a professor named Dale Jorgensen, who spearheaded the attempt to really crush her when she was getting her dissertation. This is great work. And the cost of it, Jordan, is that there's great work done by women that is sitting there, because fundamentally, the women don't want to fight the way you and I would fight for our work, because it's not necessarily fun. It's unpleasant. And, you know, with me, I have a very aggressive response to this. It's like, "how dare you talk about my work? Do you know how much better my work is than your work? And let's do this."

- Eric Weinstein, June 29, 2018, on Jordan Peterson, Eric Weinstein, & Dave Rubin LIVE