Boskin Commission: Difference between revisions

'''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.