Krugman:
Look, I’m in New York right now.

I’ve been out for the afternoon running various errands.

In MAGA mythology, I should be afraid to leave my apartment.

It should be an urban hellscape where you get murdered if you try and buy a loaf of bread.

️And the reality is New York is, in fact, one of the safest places in America.

But what will happen eventually is that
—I don’t quite know how it will work because crime data are initially supplied by local police agencies,
but the FBI summaries of that will probably be corrupted quite soon.

Just in general, if what we are actually going to be seeing is inflation,
quite a lot of inflation, we’re going to be seeing enormous pressure to report that,
first of all, things were worse.

The retrospective description of what America was like in 2024 is going to bear no resemblance to the actually pretty good state of the nation right now.

Also, we’re going to be seeing a lot of pressure to not admit things that are going wrong.
#DataManipulation #FakeFigures
#RevisionistHistory

Krugman:
This is, by the way, [what] standard autocratic regimes are known for.

️In some ways, among their first targets are #statistical #agencies because they want the numbers to say what they want the numbers to say.

I’ve been at conferences in Asia where the Chinese government announces that the economy grew 5.3 percent.

And everyone at the conference asks not “why did the Chinese economy grow by 5.3 percent?” but “why did the Chinese government decide to say that it grew by 5.3 percent?”

️The numbers are our political statements, not reality.

And if I were a federal employee at the Bureau of Labor Statistics,
I would be extremely frightened;
quite quickly they’re going to be in the line of fire.

The last time around, back during the Obama years, when there was a lot of "inflation truthers" claiming that the inflation numbers were being manipulated to make it look like there was less inflation than there was.

Such accusations are always projections
—it’s what they would do, not what was actually happening.

We turned to various kinds of private sector independent measures of inflation, many of which were originally developed by economists in places like Argentina,
where manipulation of the data was standard so they developed their own ways to measure.

We’re going to be having to do that.

My guess is by sometime next year, we’re going to be having to look at proxies for what’s actually happening to the economy,
possibly for what’s actually happening to crime,
because the official numbers are going to be corrupted.