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Boskin Commission: Difference between revisions
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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. | 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. | ||
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'''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 [[Joe Rogan Experience 1628 - Eric Weinstein (Spotify Content)|JRE 1628]] | |||
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