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A pedestrian walks past a grocery store window showing advertisements in Queens, New York, the ... A pedestrian walks past a grocery store window showing advertisements in Queens, New York, the United States on Dec. 23, 2022. The U.S. personal consumption expenditures PCE price index in November grew 0.1 percent month on month, lower than 0.2 percent of market expectations and 0.4 percent in the previous month, according to data issued by the U.S. Department of Commerce on Friday morning. (Photo by Ziyu Julian Zhu/Xinhua via Getty Images) MORE LESS Send comments and tips to talk at talkingpointsmemo dot com. To share confidential information by secure channels contact me on Signal at joshtpm dot 99 or via encrypted mail at joshtpm (at) protonmail dot com. Whether its AI or Social Media, for me at least, the routine is pretty similar. I look to see if something seems interesting or interests me. And if it does, I try to reproduce it or verify it with a human brain, i.e., my own. This morning I saw a tweet claiming that the Bureau of Labor Statistics was moving from collecting the pricing information that goes into building governments canonical inflation numbers (CPI) to relying instead on a higher percentage imputed numbers, i.e., estimates. Estimates arent all bad. A few years back it became a topic of pretty intense partisan warfare with the Census. As I recall it, the Census was combining data collection with statistical models to get more accurate counts for more marginal and transient populations where underreporting is chronic. (As you might imagine, undocumented people arent terribly eager to fill out government forms.) In any case, was it really true that BLS is cutting back on data collection?
Actually it is.
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