Anonymous #1 1d

There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that they’re *purposely* manipulating the data, but they’ve fired so many people from BLS that the data is delayed and they make more guesses (sometimes with very wild assumptions). When you add that to the falling response rate of some of these surveys, you get data that isn’t always super reliable

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Anonymous #2 1d

I mean the fact that they keep pulling reports whenever they’re unfavorable, and that the president just straight up lies about the numbers on a daily basis makes it seem like they at least want to lie.

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Anonymous #3 1d

I guess I should differentiate between the reports they cancelled and actual manipulation of the data. I don’t like that they cancelled some reports and changed the collection period this past November (due to the shutdown) in a way that likely made prices cheaper (thus making the CPI report look better). They should remain funded through the shutdown. This does have a similar effect, but isn’t the same as actually manipulating the data…

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Anonymous #2 1d

…There doesn’t seem to be much evidence that they’re actually making up fake numbers. This admin is incompetent. These numbers are watched like hawks by financial firms around the world and some anomaly would probably get flagged. There would probably also be a whistleblower. Imo the main issue here, especially for the CPI data, is that the data quality is getting worse. They have stopped including some cities in the CPI data because they don’t have people to collect it (because of gov layoffs)

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Anonymous #2 1d

When that happens, they guess based on data for a similar category (e.g. if they can’t get the price of a specific bread type in one city, they’ll take the average of all other bread types in that city). If that fails, they end up guessing based on a nearby city, using the average of the rest of the country, or just pulling from last month. The more you start guessing, the more unreliable the data becomes

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Anonymous #2 1d

oops nvm scratch the part about the average from the rest of the country. They don’t do that. For “different cell” they either expand the geography to the entire region, or pull from a nearby region (e.g. no data for Washington DC -> pull from South Atlantic if possible -> if not possible, pull from Mid-Atlantic or Northeast)

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Anonymous #4 1d

No it’s good? Why are you asking this

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