Bob Murphy

like the US government's numbers are more credible than like the Chinese government's numbers and things like that.

But again, but this is all, you know, it's a pretty big curve that we're grading on, right?

And so the thing that's interesting with economics is that I like to tell people is I can tell you just about any story you want and I don't even have to lie.

Like if I want to show that, oh, consumer prices actually went down last year, I can just throw in stuff like hedonic quality adjustments and say stuff like, oh yeah, like the smartphones are better now than they were five years ago.

And so because of that, even though the price went up, the quality per dollar you're getting is actually higher.

And so therefore they're cheaper, right?

You can do stuff like that.

And it's not that that's a crazy adjustment, but the point is when you give yourself that many degrees of freedom, you can kind of tell any story you want.

And so, yes, in general,

the government statisticians working in these places, depending on how they feel ideologically, they can tell the story one way or the other, depending on what either their direct boss wants or what they think the big boss wants to hear.

So yeah, I don't trust that stuff in general.

I mean, I think everybody kind of knows just going to the grocery store over the last five years, things are more expensive now than the official numbers indicated.

So I think that in general, yeah, the government's numbers have been downplaying the price inflation we've seen since the COVID era.

Well, sure.

Thanks for having me.

I am Infineo.

I'm the chief economist and people go to Infineo.ai.

They can see all the work we're doing there, putting life insurance on the blockchain.

And then I'm also with the Mises Institute at Mises.org.

That's M-I-S-E-S.org.