Justin Wolfers

So you might have other ways of guessing, estimating what's going on, but these guys are very, very sophisticated.

So they're almost always the best, but the best doesn't mean perfect.

And to give you a

An example, we estimate non-farm payrolls.

It makes big headlines once a month.

It's one of the most important economic indicators.

The way they do that is they call a bunch of companies and they say, how many people are you hiring right now?

Now, you might think, well, that's pretty easy.

How could that go wrong?

Well, the question is, when they call, say, 1,000 companies, did they just call one 1,000th of all companies in the United States or one 2,000th?

In order to know that, you'd have to know how many companies there were.

And the problem with that is every day there are new companies being born and there's old companies dying and they never report to the government exactly what it is they're doing.

And so the statistics, it turns out, have been overstating the extent of job growth because of the difficulties in trying to figure out how many companies have been born and dying.

So the numbers are honest.

but contestable.

Let me come back to the one that you just raised there, Ben, which is the CPI, which is how we measure the cost of living, what's going on with prices.

I'm not very worried about the fact, it is true, they've cut funding for that, which will make it less accurate, but it won't tell you that it will always understate or always overstate.

It just might be a little bit noisy around the truth.

Now, the fact that they've cut back on the number of prices that they collect actually isn't that worrying.

Let me explain why.