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Revision as of 20:29, 23 October 2025
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 âoverstatementâ in the CPI.
- The commissionâs 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 neededâan 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 problemsâusing advanced methods like gauge theory to tackle the real issue of how to measure cost-of-living changes. In contrast, the Boskin Commission wasnât 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 manipulationâacademic malpractice carried out at scale by powerful Harvard economists who rigged the numbers to meet a political target.
- This was a âperfect crimeâ that manipulated technical economic data to shift wealth away from retirees and the vulnerable, calling it âthe greatest theft in modern American history.â Because it was buried under a mountain of economic jargon and complexity, it was almost impossible for the publicâor even many economistsâto 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 effectsâcutting trillions of dollars in benefitsâmost 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 wasnât just about economic dataâit 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 colleaguesâa 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
The debate about the CPI was really a political debate about how, and by how much, to cut real entitlements.
- Greg Mankiw
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 CommissionersâJamie, could you bring up something called "Boskin, Wild versus Mild"? They brag about these things. Power wants to explain just how powerful it is. Andâdo 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 Floridaâin 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 guysâBob 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 targetâand 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.
Harvardâs 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. âSomehowâ.
âSomehowâ involved destroying anyone who said âCPI doesnât work like that at all! Itâs not a number you can dial to get consequences you like.â
- 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 indexesâboth 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 basketballâyou 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
On YouTube
On X
2009
As a courtesy to Sweden, I will observe a one week grace period for any Boskin commissioner made laureate to apologize for past sins.
I should say that Gauge theoretic economics is also all about academic freedom, quashed as it was by the rennegade Boskin Commission idiocy.
2020
I got tired of MSNBC suppressing @AndrewYang. The @DNC suppressing @TulsiGabbard. @HillaryClinton suppressing @bernie. @ABC editors suppressing reporting on Epstein. @nytimes not covering @EvergreenStCol in real time. @Harvard burying my wifeâs & my work: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/18-slipping-the-disc-state-of-the-portal-chapter-2020/id1469999563?i=1000462651162
I got tired of @RonPaul being suppressed by @GOP. The @UMich wasting years of my brotherâs life and peer review suppressing his discovery. The Boskin commission suppressing truth about inflation. How the @nsf and @theNASEM suppressed the reason for H1-B. We must name the enemy:
The enemy is the DISC. Its the complex of structures that resulted in fantastic income inequality & unrest breaking out all over the đ. It is what keeps Jamie Dimon safe from Len Bole. David Baltimore from Margot OâToole. Biden safe from Yang. Institutions safe from Individuals.
The first goal of The Portal is to install a Portal allowing young researchers in our STEM departments and Research Universities to avoid being subjected to submission to these instutions. No loyalty oaths. No signing over your intellectual property. No theft of your retirement.
I donât want you having to submit your work to an anonymous referee if you donât trust that process. What if it is an unethical competitor? What if your advisor is jealous of you or has come to dislike you? You and your work need adult options. You are a scientist not an infant.
You have a right to unionize. You have a right to know if your department canât place its graduates into professorships and is blaming you for its failures. You have a right not to be subjected to the intellectual âDroit du seigneurâ that has come over âgraduate trainingâ.
And what do I want in exchange for trying this? Selfishly, I am about to take on a fair amount of negativity and risk so I would be honored to be mentioned in your thesis acknowledgements if I can help get you a real income and the rights to your own work. But I want more.
What I most want is that you have the courage I lacked. I couldnât imagine standing up to Harvard.
I want you to swing for the fucking fences w/ your research. I want you to remember that we need you to get out of our stagnation. I want you to believe pathologically in yourself.
So letâs go after the exhaust vent in the DISC. Letâs get you a future. Jobs in the same city as the one you love. Careers while youâre young. Letâs get you savings for retirement & help raising your kids.
But to make this work: stop fetishizing âidentityâ & build our future.đ
Five days ago I released a podcast. It has been listened to by over 100,000 people. If you search twitter you will see that it generates an enormous amount of interest except from two groups: the news & professors. They are not disinterested, but anti-interested. Except for Greg.
if you haven't listened to this then you're in for a crazy, unhinged but brilliant ride.
What is anti-interesting? Well Jeffery Epsteinâs wealth source is anti-interesting to media. Bernie in 2016 was anti-interesting to @nytimes. Income inequality was anti-interesting to economists until very recently. The Las Vegas shooter was anti-interesting. Building Seven too.
To @MSNBC, @AndrewYang is pathologically anti-interesting. Flight 800 is pretty anti-interesting as was the Boskin Commissionâs attempt to transfer 1 Trillion Dollars by hacking the CPI. The H1-B visa history is anti-interesting. As are broken laboratory mice with long telomeres.
Anti-interesting, adj. 1) A subject is said to be anti-interesting if it is absolutely fascinating to the point where there is a strong market for itâs investigation but it threatens an institution capable of stifling discussion inside the Gated Institutional Narrative (GIN).
But I find these things fascinating. As do we all. Do stay tuned to The Portal.
More to come. Thanks @greggutfeld!
If you want to see this theory of Idea Suppression in action, retweet the first tweet in the thread with hashtag #SlipTheDISC. Hey, who knows...We might be able to change the game.
2021
Yes. But it is âYou pl.â My co-discoverer is @PiaMalaney who Maldacena sourced but didnât (originally) cite.
You can read all about the discovery and burial of Gauge Theoretic economics by the Boskin Commissioners on the Harvard Economics Faculty in âThe Physics of Wall Street.â
Wait was it you? Cause that's pretty damn funny if true
Youâve got to be kidding me. Now *I* am being lectured on index numbers?
Uh. Ok. [Breathe]
With all due respect: economists simply do not understand index numbers. And they hunt down all those who point this out.
I have to rethink my internet usage. This is getting too stupid.
Eric: that's what a "Price Index" does. Some economists spend a lot of time comparing the pros and cons of different ways of constructing a price index. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_index
I just need to face up to the fact that I need to rethink all my academic internet interchanges.
I canât do this. This is pointless. First Maldacena. Now, implicitly, Jorgensen and the Boskin commission. Itâs too absurd and itâs not going to get smarter or stop.
Recalculating..
One of the things my trolls like to point to is outrageous claims.
One of my most *outrageous* is that my joint work on a 2nd Marginal Revolution for economics was scuttled by the Harvard Department of Economics Boskin Commissioners.
Yet itâs admitted:
https://ritholtz.com/2010/01/why-michael-boskin-deserves-our-contempt/
Itâs kind of an interesting puzzle. Why is it that a Harvard Professor (Mankiw) can say the truth which is that this was a conspiracy to cut entitlements. But the only two people who can CALCULATE a COLA for changing tastes are crazy for saying their work was deliberately buried?
In any event, I stand by my claim. The Boskin Commission was organized by Moynihan and Packwood to deliberately break the CPI in a precise amount to avoid the US paying 1 trillion dollars over 10 years.
And I promise you no leading economist will call bullshit to debate this.
On of the reasons is that one of the commissioners bragged about this being the motivation behind the scenes.
Okay. So why canât we have gauge theoretic economics reevaluated? Everyone admits this is what happened. Why continue to bury the advance?
I dunno. But itâs amazing!
The moral of the story to me is this:
We canât have outside folks calculating and theorizing while the inside economists are fudging and cooking the books.
And calling me crazy wonât change a thing when this is finally understood. Itâs simply institutional academic malpractice.
CPI is broken. Why?
Think of CPI as a gauge like a thermometer. You canât have politically motivated folks making your thermometers or they can change the design to cover up climate change. Likewise you canât have economists changing the gauge to disguise the effect of printing.
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.
The economists canât yet compute a dynamic Cost-Of-Living-Adjustment or COLA or âChained Changing Preference Ordinal Welfare Konus Indexâ to be perfectly pedantic. Not because it doesnât exist. But because they donât have the math and donât want to lose their finger on the scale.
But more importantly, we have a culture that economics literally trumpets (and I swear I am not making this up) âEconomic Imperialismâ. It is âwe know math and you donâtâ-culture.
No. They donât know their own math. I will debate any high ranking economist on this point.
Itâs 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 âWe know your field better because we do math.â
No. Economics is a avoiding gauge theory, connections, Lie Groups, etc so it can retain its political relevance as an expert consultancy. Iâm with the crypto folks on this. Our economy must be protected from Seigniorage (printing money) and CPI tampering (e.g. Boskin Commission).
CPI should notâŚMUST NOTâŚbe 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.
End the forced wealth transfers of central bankers covering up their own failures with âReliefâ, âEasingâ, âStimulousâ, âRescuesâ, âToxic Asset Purchasesâ, and other bailouts of our incompetent financial overlords.
We must protect CPI from economists disguising wealth dilution.
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
Moral: Gauge Theory fixes this intellectual corruption problem of economic imperialism, and #btc, blockchains and Crytpo can help.
I am wholly supportive of this effort. Whether this iteration succeeds or fails is immaterial. The important thing is to take inflation away from those who would disguise:
A) The printing of fiat money by central bankers.
B) The fact that economists are holding back the field.
Why are they holding back the theory of index numbers (CPI, GDP)? Because the more innovation, the less freedom to dial our gauges to whatever values the political patrons of macro economics ask. The field is literally held back by leading economists to preserve their own power.
Around 1996, Boskin Commissioner Jorgensen held back the biggest unambiguous advance in mathematical economics that I am aware of in decades. It would have interfered with their finding that the CPI was 1.1% overstated. He calculated 1.1% would save a round Trillion for U.S.
We canât afford for economics to pretend it is a science in public, yet act as an incentive operated consultancy which can get you any result you need to fit the political agenda.
So this effort of @balajis needs to be supported! We must take this away from our current leaders.
Inflation is like a thermometer. You ask how hot/cold it is. You donât get to ask âWhat do you need the Gauge to say? How much thumb should be on the scale?â
This is all discussed in detail by Jim Weatherall in his book in the final chapter/epilogue:
https://www.amazon.com/Physics-Wall-Street-Predicting-Unpredictable-ebook/dp/B006R8PMJS/ref=nodl_
Lastly, it is high time my co-developer of the theory got her due without being subjected to both the Matilda & Matthew effects. Man-boys really do drive technical women out of technical fields because they canât cite a woman who is smarter than they are. Enough.
Go @balajis.
The co-developer of gauge thy in econ as a 2nd Marginal Revolution is Pia Malaney in the early 1990s at Harvard.
There is no reason to pretend this inflation thy never happened just to flatter power. Letâs disintermediate the old:
I think this is a great introduction to geometric marginalism and economic field theory. Hope you love it:
https://www.fields.utoronto.ca/talks/neoclassical-mechanics-economic-field-theory
This eliminates a step or two. You may have to watch in lower resolution if you are on your phone however: https://x.com/sabinowitz/status/1423394091409330182
ANNOUNCEMENT: I head next week to @UChicago for 5 days (Nov. 8-12) at the request of its storied Department of Economics to present our theory that all of economics is based on the wrong version of the differential calculus.
Importantly, this error afflicts Inflation & the CPI.
Hi Eric, where can I find your calculations, data, and conclusions on what the real inflation and CPI numbers are?
Weird question. You seem to have me confused for the BLS. I don't take in Data. I don't have a staff or a budget. You're assuming that I have the 'Real Inflation & CPI numbers'. I don't.
This is about not even having a correct *theory* to calculate. What we corrected was theory.
So if you have the correct theory then why wouldn't you be able to calculate the correct results from the existing input data available?
I didnât say what you said. I said there was a wrong theory for CPI. We corrected that theory.
The issue of how to implement a theory in practice leases to different data being collected and different aggregations. For a different theory, you would collect different data.
As an example. The Boskin commission gave a single illustrative example in their report using two goods, chicken and beef. They gave prices but not ordinal utility. Here is the COL answer assuming Cobb-Douglas and Linear interpolation of all quantities. They could not compute it.
The reason they had no theory to cover it was because the C-D exponent changed. And there is a claim that no extension of the Konus COL exists for dynamic tastes.
Hope that helps with your confusion. Be well.
*leads not leases in the above.
The funniest part of our inflation measure is the â.8â here.
I so wish they were a little bolder and went with â6.8139942%, plus or minus 3*10**(-7) according to a Lowe index modified by hedonic adjustment for sub-aggregatesâ or some such.
More of us could share such a moment.
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:
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.
Itâs effectively made up to make the â6.xâ look solid. Which it isnât.
Do you actually have a point here? Your quibble is with the â.8â because it âmakes the 6.x look goodâ??? How do you figure. I honestly think you tweet sometimes purely for the sake of it
Actually there are many points.
Inflation isnât a number itâs a field.
Inflation is path dependent.
Donât advertise precision that doesnât exist.
CPI is not yet in the COL framework as claimed by BLS.
Path dependence should be embraced.
Etc.
My followers have heard them.
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?
This seems to be more along the line of your ânuclear vs nucularâ 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..
I donât 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.
D) Embrace curvature if moving to chaining.
E) Publish methodology of basket or representative consumer(s). BLS isnât 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).
H) Move to field theoretic & group-valued indices (e.g. GL(2, R) indices for trade).
I) Stop trying to hide Holonomy. Itâs 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.
Iâm prepared to have high level conversations about this. But our current system is an abomination. No one knows what is in or out. Itâs 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.
2022
BOSKIN PRINCIPLE: âTell us what number you want to see for CPI, and we can create a ârepresentative consumerâ and choice of Index number & methodology to print you *exactly* the number you requested.â
Sadly, there are corresponding principles for the Fed and central banking.
Fed's Huge Problem: Main Street Does Not Believe The Fed's & Wall Street's Inflation Forecasts https://zerohedge.com/markets/feds-huge-problem-main-street-does-not-believe-feds-wall-streets-inflation-forecasts
Well let us give economists their due.
The most cogent economists on the subject of price indices include:
Bert M Balk (Statistics Netherlands)
Carl Christian von Weizsäcker
Paul Samuelson and S Swamy
Amartya Sen
Franklin Fisher and Karl Shell
and Erwin Diewert (very uneven).
I cannot be objective about my collaborator @PiaMalaney, but I can say that it would be a good idea to review her critique by the Boskin commissioners, who I found to represent the âPsst. Just tell us what you need the number to be and we can help you out.â school of economics.
"I've never seen anything as bad as the determination of a lot of people to say it's a recession," Krugman said. "It's above and beyond anything I've ever seen." -@paulkrugman
Would you like to talk about the Boskin Commission & the @BLS_gov pretending to move to a COLA for CPI?
Even top economists are struggling to explain perhaps "the weirdest economy" Americans have ever lived through, CNN's chief media correspondent Brian Stelter said. https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/31/media/economy-paul-krugman-reliable-sources/index.html
Would you be interested in discussing an entire field of economic experts laughing for 5-8 years at those of us who tried to warn the world about the impending danger of Mortgage Backed Securities during the âGreat Moderationâ?
Would you be interested in discussing the treatment of George Borjas by economists for pointing out that Immigration actually carries costs & redistributes wealth rather than a miracle free lunch that simply cannot do anything harmful?
Etc. Etc.
Because that is all much worse.
Youâre not being truthful about economics.
Iâm sorry. But at a purely technical level, you are just not being truthful about markets, economics and economists. I say this without an axe to grind as a huge promoter of your earlier work when you were trying to understand the đ.
2025
Your Economics department took orders from 2 senators (Packwood (R) & Moynihan (D)) as an extension of the USG to bury my research w/ P Malaney so that it could fake a 1.1% CPI overstatement to raise Taxes (via indexed brackets) and cut SS payments (via COLAs)!
You are lying.
âNo governmentâregardless of which party is in powerâshould dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue.â - President Alan Garber
Let me explain the previous slide of Boskin Commissioner Prof. Robert Gordon in plain English.
Harvardâs 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. âSomehowâ.
âSomehowâ involved destroying anyone who said âCPI doesnât work like that at all! Itâs not a number you can dial to get consequences you like.â
@Harvard: if you want to have me back, I will debate anyone in your economics department as a former member myself that Harvard Economics frequently has acted as an arm of the USG to bury research or dissenting experts that contradicted the narratives set in DC.
We can discuss trade as well as immigration.
If you were standing for academic independence, I would be shoulder to shoulder with you. But you are disguising the actual relationship between Harvard and the Federal Government where Harvard often academically launders government narratives to push policy objectives down the throats of ordinary Americans as favors to power and DC.
So how do the big boys play?
First: Peer review before publication is for the little people:
Harvard supplied two of the economists.
What academic Harvard level methodology did they use to bury us?
So: âWhen in doubt, cut the number by half.â
Result: âBillions slipping off the keyboard.â
This is in the confession. Iâm not making it up.
Your professors and department joined a hit job that was openly a government special purpose creation to cryptically slash benefits and raise taxes via a back door. The CPI!
âWe were a creation of the Senate Finance Committee and especially of the soon to be Disgraced Bob Packwood and ⌠Daniel Moynihan.â I swear it is right there.
You destroy those who do actual academic research that gets in the way of Harvardâs special relationship, laundering D.C. power.
I would love to discuss this odd relationship you have with academics and power. Specifically:
The Theory of Trade
The Theory of Immigration
The Theory Gauged Marginalism
The Theory of Index Construction
I assume if this academic freedom is important to you @harvard, you can afford to explore this in a seminar or two with a former member of the @HarvardEcon dept.
I can relay then what Professors explained to me at the time about how the real game is played with D.C. to an academic audience.
Veritas,
Eric
There is just something special about Harvard lying to Harvard about Harvard because itâs Harvard.
Not to tell Harvard its business, but at some point you have to stop this. Your brand has âmovedâ after having a plagiarist leader. Or havenât you noticed? Or donât you care? đ¤ˇââď¸
Iâve got it! Letâs hire 2 @HarvardEcon Economists & their friends to say our CPI is massively overstated by 1.1%, to raise billions in tax revenue and slash billions in Social Security/Medicare. Yet again!
All we have to do is Weaponize peer review. Like last time.
Whoâs in?
1. We absolutely need to reduce the deficit
2. All the ways we could do so are political suicide
I donât know how to resolve this.