> Cole was formerly a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of the U.S. Congress, where he used to advise Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, and write official economic reports. These days he's a writer at Full Stack Economics. For most of his economics career, he says, he had believed that official government statistics actually made inflation seem worse than it really was. He had thought they didn't fully capture improvements in the quality of products and services when quantifying changes in prices.
> [...]
> Mismeasuring inflation has important implications. For example, it's common to hear people argue that the real, or inflation-adjusted, wage of the typical American worker has stagnated in recent decades. But if the government has been overstating inflation in its statistics, this means American workers' paychecks actually go further and living standards have gotten better than official statistics say.
So this guy's been spending years saying inflation was much lower than the stats show for political reasons and now he's saying the opposite at a time when that would happen to be politically opportune. Hm.
> [...]
> Mismeasuring inflation has important implications. For example, it's common to hear people argue that the real, or inflation-adjusted, wage of the typical American worker has stagnated in recent decades. But if the government has been overstating inflation in its statistics, this means American workers' paychecks actually go further and living standards have gotten better than official statistics say.
So this guy's been spending years saying inflation was much lower than the stats show for political reasons and now he's saying the opposite at a time when that would happen to be politically opportune. Hm.