CPI

On X

2010

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Telomeres, Scientist Shortages, Seiberg Witten, Inflation (CPI), E8 TOE, Immigration, Neoclassical tastes all now have fictional narratives.

10:02 PM · May 1, 2010

2013

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Naughty Math Games?? The USA Today headline calls our gauge theoretic CPI an evil trick to be used for good. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/02/12/evil-wall-street-tricks-can-be-used-for-good/1914479/

7:11 AM · Feb 13, 2013

2018

Daniel W. Drezner

@dandrezner

You knew damn well I was gonna have a take on this when you followed me. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/11/the-ideas-industry-meets-the-intellectual-dark-web/

12:11 PM · May 11, 2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

"all these thinkers can do is appease their followers. They are thought leaders who cannot demonstrate any leadership." -@dandrezner

Nice to meet you Dan. But that "take" comes from where exactly? Research? Personal interaction? You left me confused because it didn't make sense.

5:18 PM · May 11, 2018

Daniel W. Drezner

@dandrezner

Nice to meet you too, Eric. That "take" came from the @bariweiss essay that started this entire hullabaloo.

6:11 PM · May 11, 2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Splendid. But that "Take" isn't what the IDW is about. I mean do you take issue w/ my work on labor markets? Mortgage backed securities? CPI and GDP? Bret's take on drug testing on specially bred mice? Heather on risk in Education? Ben's conservative objection to Breitbart/Trump?

6:45 PM · May 11, 2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Are you objecting to Sam Harris' desire to put transcendence into Athiesm via meditation or even psychedlics? Jordan's emphasis on needing to offer unapologetically family/work-oriented male models to outcompete the lure of hate?

It just seems you found a take without a basis.

6:49 PM · May 11, 2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

May I ask you to look again or too explain why all the interesting things we talk about are of no interest? You might want to look at my essays on Russell Conjugation, Excellence, The crisis in Physics, Four Quadrant model, Kayfabe, Anthropic Capitalism, Coasian immigration, etc.

6:52 PM · May 11, 2018

Daniel W. Drezner

@dandrezner

Sure, I'll take a look.

7:08 PM · May 11, 2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

How did it go? Honestly I would have thought this research would happen before forming such a strong conclusion.

11:54 PM · May 11, 2018

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

[please continue to hold.....]

1:27 AM · May 12, 2018

2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Thanks for the invitation. I can try to explain my concern.

There really *is* a problem w MAGA, Trump, Qanon & conspiracy theories running rampant. And it will result in death & destruction if it spins out of control.

However it is being fueled by those who claim to fight it.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

CBR_wick

@CBR_wick

Hi @EricRWeinstein. Can you please explain to the public why you would be preemptive like this in a way that seems to contradict your value system? 🙏

12:42 AM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The entire war over fact checking is a war of 2 low resolution teams.

One team wants absolute freedom to spread wild eyed theories that just about everything is a psyop or a false flag.

The other team wants to impose institutional consensus reality on everyone via media & tech.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Unfortunately, I can’t live under either. So each of the warring parties thinks I’m against them & for the other team. In their mentalities if you aren’t on their simplistic team you are, de facto, working for the other side. There’s no basic concept of *responsible* heterodoxy.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

No the Freemasons do not run everything on behalf of pedophile reptilians who faked Sandy Hook with crisis actors.

Yes there are/were conspiracies behind Epstein, H1B, @MSNBC, PPE, climate science, the “Great Moderation”, Great Reset...everywhere institutions want a “consensus”.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Having spent a good portion of my 20s at Harvard, I know *exactly* how this game works. Our betters sit down and try to figure out how to control others behind closed doors. They see themselves as the intrinsically enlightened people who need to do the thinking for all of us.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

When they wanted to cut our Social Security payments & raise our taxes they opted to try to change the CPI rather than pass legislation. When they wanted to pay less for scientists they knew to keep *silent* about NSF Labor Shortage claims even though such shortages don’t exist.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

These are the folks who tell you “masks don’t work” rather than “save masks for doctors as we forgot to restock them and moved all manufacturing to China like morons”. They will then spin on a dime to tell you “Only bad dumb people don’t wear masks”. This is the worst of Harvard.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So I don’t want Alex Jones and Qanon nor do I want @TwitterSafety, @msnbc and @Harvard. I see them as very different forms of the same thing: people who want to take away our ability to see clearly.

And, I assure you, @Harvard tries to paint anyone it can’t control as dangerous.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So, my belief is that anyone who rejects/questions Davos, Consensus Reality, Institutional Narrative, Public Health Campaigns, High Immigration, Peer Review, Primary Election Coverage, Trust & Safety...will be treated as Alex Jones sooner or Later.

This is Managed Reality ™.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I cannot live in Managed Reality ™ because I think it defeats the purpose of being a human being. It negates being an American. It abdicates responsibility for our children.

I have defeated Harvard about half the times we have fought. How? Because they just aren’t that good.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Managed Reality ™ has a weak spot. It’s not run by our A-team anymore. Fauci isn’t Francis Crick. Biden isn’t Elon. Janet Yellen isn’t Satoshi.

In general, the A-Team is going independent because tech/media/Ed are enforcing way too much conformity through personal destruction.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

So why am I worried?

Well, I’ve been trying to save the institutions. It’s probably doomed, but almost no one is trying to do what I do: rescue the institutions from their death spiral by reinserting their critics in positions of prominence (eg Chomsky at MIT).

Hence my fear.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

If I were a tech guy I’d retreat into wealth. If I were a professor I’d shut up and collect my salary with job security. If I was a politician or journalist I’d follow the other sheep.

But I’m a science guy, an American and a dad. And I want my kids to have a particular future.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Thanks.

3:50 PM · Feb 12, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

CPI is broken. Why?

Think of CPI as a gauge like a thermometer. You can’t have politically motivated folks making your thermometers or they can change the design to cover up climate change. Likewise you can’t have economists changing the gauge to disguise the effect of printing.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

sam.frax

@samkazemian

A crypto native CPI governed on the blockchain to create a decentralized stablecoin people can rely on to keep their standard of living the same across time. A true alternative to fiat rather than a speculative investment asset like most other coins.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The economists can’t yet compute a dynamic Cost-Of-Living-Adjustment or COLA or “Chained Changing Preference Ordinal Welfare Konus Index” to be perfectly pedantic. Not because it doesn’t exist. But because they don’t have the math and don’t want to lose their finger on the scale.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

We must take CPI away from those who wish to back out a political agenda of printing money, raising our taxes by indexed tax brackets and slashing our indexed social security & Medicare.

Economics can’t construct dynamic economic gauges like CPI/GDP until it learns gauge thy.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

But more importantly, we have a culture that economics literally trumpets (and I swear I am not making this up) “Economic Imperialism”. It is “we know math and you don’t”-culture.

No. They don’t know their own math. I will debate any high ranking economist on this point.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

It’s time to reveal that economics, far from embracing math or having physics envy, is deliberately avoiding solutions to old problems so that it can make up new gauges for CPI/GDP at will while telling the rest of the soft sciences “We know your field better because we do math.”

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

No. Economics is an avoiding gauge theory, connections, Lie Groups, etc so it can retain its political relevance as an expert consultancy. I’m with the crypto folks on this. Our economy must be protected from Seigniorage (printing money) and CPI tampering (e.g. Boskin Commission).

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

CPI should not…MUST NOT…be adjustable to disguise inflation. It needs to be protected from the FED diluting the power of money and the BLS being free to disguise the effects by changing the method of construction.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

End the forced wealth transfers of central bankers covering up their own failures with “Relief”, “Easing”, “Stimulous”, “Rescues”, “Toxic Asset Purchases”, and other bailouts of our incompetent financial overlords.

We must protect CPI from economists disguising wealth dilution.

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

P.S. before you remind me how arrogant this sounds, keep in mind, that I am willing to debate this publicly with any leading economist eager to defend the central bankers and triumphalist theorists openly bragging about their math. Read this, and be sick:

https://nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w7300/w7300.pdf

6:52 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Moral: Gauge Theory fixes this intellectual corruption problem of economic imperialism, and #btc, blockchains and Crytpo can help.

6:59 AM · Jun 15, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Surprise.

[Word to the wise: watch very very carefully how your CPI is constructed. You have the right to know EXACTLY how it is constructed.]

5:26 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Bloomberg

@business

NEW: Powell says it's time to retire the word "transitory" regarding inflation https://www.bloomberg.com/news/live-blog/2021-11-29/powell-and-yellen-in-the-senate-kwkw102n

3:41 AM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

It’s hard to imagine how confused Economics is. Imagine you work for the @BLS_gov and you have to admit that your agency claims to compute our Inflation within a Cost-Of-Living framework, but doesn’t maintain the central ingredient needed to compute or even impute Cost-Of-Living.

5:26 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Joey Politano

@JosephPolitano

There are no preference maps, chained CPI employs a superlative Tornqvist formula to account for substitution. The documents introducing the chained CPI do a better job outlining the methodological and theoretical structures than I could.(https://bls.gov/cpi/additional-resources/chained-cpi-introduction.pdf)

10:24 PM · Nov 6, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Follow the thread back from here. This is where the conversation ends. #EconTwitter may tell you terrible things about me.

Maybe. Or maybe they don’t have a theory that works and they refuse to admit it while transferring billions through CPI releases.

5:26 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Wait. Slow down.

Did you just say that BLS is claiming to work within a Cost of Living framework which *requires* preference maps *definitionally*, but…words fail me…has no preference maps? At all??

I must not be understanding. Chaining Tornqvist indexes isn’t an answer here.

10:17 PM · Nov 6, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

You cannot keep mumbling Economic word salad forever “Modified Laspeyres…core inflation…Lowe generalization of the Laspeyres…Chained Tornqvist with revisions…chain drift…superlative index approximates flexible functional form…”

5:26 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Tastes change. Cost-Of-Living inflation is about tastes. If tastes evolve in time, the economists’ COL framework disintegrates. That is: there is NO theory. #EconTwitter can tell you I don’t get it.

It is THEY who don’t get it. They can’t escape it. It’s in their own literature.

5:26 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

What you are seeing reported as Inflation is not coming from a well grounded theory. It is coming from human beings making policy level judgements as if they were merely making technical adjustments to a technical time series devoid of values about who should benefit or suffer.

5:26 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Moral: you have a right to know what’s in your food and how your pharmaceuticals were tested. You have a right to ask your surgeon what she plans to do during an operation.

You have a right to demand what economists are actually measuring as Cost-Of-Living W/O abuse for asking.

5:28 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

And, no, the answers to these questions are NOT in the BLS handbook on CPI methodology. I’ve looked.

5:30 PM · Nov 30, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The funniest part of our inflation measure is the “.8” here.

I so wish they were a little bolder and went with “6.8139942%, plus or minus 3*10**(-7) according to a Lowe index modified by hedonic adjustment for sub-aggregates” or some such.

More of us could share such a moment.

5:13 AM · Dec 29, 2021

Charlie Bilello

@charliebilello

5 / The 6.8% inflation rate in the US is the highest inflation we've seen since 1982 and is understating true price increases as it assumes "shelter" (largest component of CPI @ 33%) only increased 3.8% in the last year.

Breakdown of reported CPI:

3:08 PM · Dec 24, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

The meaning of the .8 is significant, but only because of the wealth that will be transferred by it. It is not really meaningful as part of a measure of the cost of living for the representative consumer.

It’s effectively made up to make the “6.x” look solid. Which it isn’t.

5:13 AM · Dec 29, 2021

JAB

@b_bran223

Do you actually have a point here? Your quibble is with the “.8” because it “makes the 6.x look good”??? How do you figure. I honestly think you tweet sometimes purely for the sake of it

5:17 AM · Dec 29, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

Actually there are many points.

Inflation isn’t a number it’s a field.

Inflation is path dependent.

Don’t advertise precision that doesn’t exist.

CPI is not yet in the COL framework as claimed by BLS.

Path dependence should be embraced.

Etc.

My followers have heard them.

6:59 AM · Dec 29, 2021

JAB

@b_bran223

Eric, I am one such enlightened follower..

In what regard/magnitude is stochastic path dependency to change such CPI value if prior estimates are proportionately miscalculated? At this point in time, how best would you gauge the relative rate?

5:17 AM · Dec 29, 2021

JAB

@b_bran223

This seems to be more along the line of your “nuclear vs nucular” reference by which we quibble about semantics, with absurdly low impact on the end problem. The lack of precision for x path dependent function would similarly yield y persons debating lack of precision..

5:21 AM · Dec 29, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I don’t want to go into it all here. But here is what I want.

A) BLS stops lying about COL framework. Stops hand waving about economic vs mechanical indexes.

B) Stop readying c-cpi-u to take over from cpi-u. We can see you coming.

C) Move towards personalized CPI using inputs.

9:55 AM · Dec 29, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

D) Embrace curvature if moving to chaining.

E) Publish methodology of basket or representative consumer(s). BLS isn’t an oracle.

F) Consider moving to a Cobb-Douglas/CES aware changing preference mechanical index if wedded to COL.

G) Admit to conflicts of interest (Boskin).

9:59 AM · Dec 29, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

H) Move to field theoretic & group-valued indices (e.g. GL(2, R) indices for trade).

I) Stop trying to hide Holonomy. It’s there. Accept that it is supposed to be there rather than hiding it with Walsh multi-period circularity test.

Etc.

But please stop making vacuous claims.

10:04 AM · Dec 29, 2021

Eric Weinstein

@EricRWeinstein

I’m prepared to have high level conversations about this. But our current system is an abomination. No one knows what is in or out. It’s a black box that means little. The theory is bad. The explanations are fake. And the system is opaque. Even a Laspeyres without lies is better.

10:07 AM · Dec 29, 2021

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• Great Moderation

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