A (20:26)
Ben, I appreciate the question. I think it's actually a particularly important question for us to look the viewers in the eye and tell our audience exactly what's going on out there. And it's really hard because it used to be a very simple question to ask, which it used to be that anything that comes out of the federal government has been fact checked and is true. Even if it was spin, say, for instance, in a former president's State of the Union address, it would be spin, but it would still be true. And so we would always say the facts are true. The context you might need to think about, we're now in a much trickier world. And so I think it's really important to distinguish between who different facts are coming from and the quality of different claims. So the first thing that's completely obvious is almost everything that comes out of the White House is a lie. If it's true, it's a mere accident. So that means if something comes out of the President's mouth, it's almost certainly untrue. If it comes out of the Treasury Secretary's mouth, it may well be untrue. If it comes out of the Commerce Secretary's mouth, just go and run away and stop listening to him. If it comes out of the press secretary's mouth, she's a relentless liar. So anyone inside the White House, just forget it. Separately, there's our economic statistics. Our economic statistics are compiled by independent or independent ish agencies. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and the Census Bureau. These are totally serious statisticians who are doing the best they can with the resources they can. Nothing that comes out of those organizations is a lie still. Okay? And I think it's really important, as much as we might worry about the statistics, none of it's a political lie. Having said that, that doesn't mean they're always the truth. Which is to say any statistic is an estimate. It's a best guess using a specific methodology. And at different times and places, those methodologies can be stronger or weaker. We never know the truth because in order to know, for instance, the truth of total income earned in America, we'd have to talk to every American and find out how much income they've earned. We don't do that. We have to ask people, did we ask the right subset? Did they tell the truth? Were they thinking about pre tax or post tax? All sorts of things go on. Statistical sausage is really quite complex. So even though these numbers are the truth, they are open to critique. Now here's where I really want to be careful. They're almost always, because we're blessed by extraordinarily good statisticians in the United States. They're almost always the best possible guess. So you might have other ways of guessing, estimating what's going on. But these guys are very, very sophisticated. So they're almost always the best. But the best doesn't mean perfect. And to give you an example, we estimate non farm payrolls. It makes big headlines once a month. It's one of the most important economic indicators. The way they do that is they call a bunch of companies and they say, how many people are you hiring right now? Now you might think, well, that's pretty easy. How could that go wrong? Well, the question is, when they call, say 1000 companies, did they just call 1 1000th of all companies in the United States or 1 2000th in order to know that, you'd have to know how many companies there were. And the problem with that is every day there are new companies being born and there's old companies dying and they never report to the government exactly what it is they're doing. And so the statistics, it turns out, have been overstating the extent of job growth because of the difficulties in trying to figure out how many companies are being born and dying. So the numbers are honest but contestable. Let me come back to the one that you just raised there, Ben, which is the cpi, which is how we measure the cost of living, what's going on with prices. I'm not very worried about the fact it is true they've cut funding for that, which will make it less accurate, but it won't tell you that it will always understate or always overstate. It just might be a little bit noisy around the truth. Now, the fact that they've cut back on the number of prices that they collect actually isn't that worrying. Let me explain why. It turns out you must have been through one of those intersections where there's a gas station on every corner. Turns out when there's two gas stations next to each other, they usually have pretty much the same price. So therefore, if we only surveyed one of those gas stations, we'd have a pretty good guess about what's going on with gas prices. That analogy holds more broadly. Often a chocolate bar that sold in one store is sold at the same price as another store could be. In the old days we were surveying both stores. Today we just survey one store. But realize as long as that correlation remains high that we still have pretty accurate measurements. So I am going to continue to say we should trust the statistics, but if you want to go deeper, we can talk about exactly what it is they mean. And I think that's the harder question.
