And he is not an economist, yet he is a well known econ crank.
Here's an actual economist [1], looking at the evidence one decade past the Boskin report - concludes the same thing.
And, the really cool thing about inflation over that length of time, is you can check it for yourself (which I have showing people why ShadowStats is complete nonsense).
Get some old ads from the start of the period (say 1996, the year of the Boskin Report), and look at prices. Put them in excel. Do the same for now. Compute a reasonable basket.
And here is the really neat part - see if the BLS reported CPI over that period matches reality, or if adding 1.1% annually matches reality.
I will spoil the result - BLS is correct.
From the CPI calculator, Jan 1996 to Jan 2021, inflation is a 1.69 multiplier, for an annual rate of 2.12%. Add back the supposed 1.1%, take the 3.22% over the same 25 years, get a 2.21 multiplier, quite a difference.
And, for the record, there are lots of other places tracing inflation, like the Billion Prices Project, that reach the same conclusions. If the govt lied about it, there would be awesome arbitrage opportunity (and like all such things, people have even investigated that - no such lies - papers on Arxiv).
Google any inflation linked asset, from bonds, ETFs, swaps, all sorts of derivatives. If you know inflation is consistently wrong, all such things are mispriced. Then it's simple to hedge against non inflation versions of the same, or buy derivatives constructed against them, to extract the risk free difference.
If you dig around you'll find finance papers measuring such things, demonstrating no one has found any such exploitable gaps. Plenty of groups try.
And he is not an economist, yet he is a well known econ crank.
Here's an actual economist [1], looking at the evidence one decade past the Boskin report - concludes the same thing.
And, the really cool thing about inflation over that length of time, is you can check it for yourself (which I have showing people why ShadowStats is complete nonsense).
Get some old ads from the start of the period (say 1996, the year of the Boskin Report), and look at prices. Put them in excel. Do the same for now. Compute a reasonable basket.
And here is the really neat part - see if the BLS reported CPI over that period matches reality, or if adding 1.1% annually matches reality.
I will spoil the result - BLS is correct.
From the CPI calculator, Jan 1996 to Jan 2021, inflation is a 1.69 multiplier, for an annual rate of 2.12%. Add back the supposed 1.1%, take the 3.22% over the same 25 years, get a 2.21 multiplier, quite a difference.
And, for the record, there are lots of other places tracing inflation, like the Billion Prices Project, that reach the same conclusions. If the govt lied about it, there would be awesome arbitrage opportunity (and like all such things, people have even investigated that - no such lies - papers on Arxiv).
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w12311/w123...