Boskin Commission

The Boskin Commission, formally the Advisory Commission to Study the Consumer Price Index, was established in 1995 by the U.S. Senate, with the ostensible mandate to examine the accuracy of the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures inflation. Chaired by economist Michael Boskin, the commission concluded in its 1996 report that the CPI overstated inflation by about 1.1 percentage points annually.

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 Moynahan 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 also want to steelman the other position so that you have something to fight against or to wrestle with. If I think about—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 Rubens work in 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