Episode 51: The Price of Doubt: How Important are Reliable Statistics?

With the firing of the BLS commissioner in 2025 and continued issues with collecting macro data, a new NBER working paper “The Value of Reliable Statistics” by Bloom et al. tries to examine the importance of quality official statistics. And if someone is doing calculations, Steve, Nathan, and Brent are on it! In this episode they dig into the methodology and meaning of the paper and have some suggestions for how they would run things if they were in charge of the BLS.

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