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“It’s all true: Everything is fake,” tweeted Former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao regarding a Wednesday New York Magazine article which reveals that internet traffic metrics from some of the largest tech companies are overstated or fabricated. In other words; they’re bullshit.

Pao was responding to a tweet by the Washington Post‘s Aram Zucker-Schariff, quoting the following segment of the article:

The metrics are fake.

Take something as seemingly simple as how we measure web traffic. Metrics should be the most real thing on the internet: They are countable, trackable, and verifiable, and their existence undergirds the advertising business that drives our biggest social and search platforms. Yet not even Facebook, the world’s greatest data–gathering organization, seems able to produce genuine figures. In October, small advertisers filed suit against the social-media giant, accusing it of covering up, for a year, its significant overstatements of the time users spent watching videos on the platform (by 60 to 80 percent, Facebook says; by 150 to 900 percent, the plaintiffs say). According to an exhaustive list at MarketingLand, over the past two years Facebook has admitted to misreporting the reach of posts on Facebook Pages (in two different ways), the rate at which viewers complete ad videos, the average time spent reading its “Instant Articles,” the amount of referral traffic from Facebook to external websites, the number of views that videos received via Facebook’s mobile site, and the number of video views in Instant Articles.

Can we still trust the metrics? After the Inversion, what’s the point? Even when we put our faith in their accuracy, there’s something not quite real about them: My favorite statistic this year was Facebook’s claim that 75 million people watched at least a minute of Facebook Watch videos every day —

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Minority Report Comes To Life: UK Police Will Use AI To Prevent Crime

November 28, 2018

Minority Report Comes To Life: UK Police Will Use AI To Prevent Crime

With increasing availability of information and new technologies, West Midlands Police in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England, has taken a page from the 2002 American neo-noir science fiction film, Minority Report, and will soon deploy artificial intelligence to stop crime before it happens, New Scientist reveals.

The “pre-crime” software, called the National Data Analytics Solution (NDAS), uses a blend of AI, citywide smart cameras, and statistics to try to evaluate the risk of someone committing and or becoming a victim of a violent crime.

West Midlands Police has taken the lead on the project and will finish the prototype system by the end of 1Q 2019. Eight other police forces across the country are involved in the development, including London’s Metropolitan Police and Greater Manchester Police. NDAS will be piloted in the Midlands district before a nationwide rollout. One of the main reasons behind predictive policing – is a cost-savings tool for law enforcement agencies that have been dealing with funding issues, said Iain Donnelly, the police lead on the project.

Donnelly insists NDAS algorithms will sniff out already known criminals, and divert them with “therapeutic interventions,” such as “support from local health or social workers” to avert a crime.

West Midlands Police used data and statistics from past criminal events to identify 1,400 potential indicators for crime, including 30 important ones. Machine learning algorithms then took the data points and learned how to detect crime while analyzing video from smart cameras.

Predictive policing is based on prior criminal stats, including stops, arrests, and convictions, and it is incapable of expanding the pool of suspects beyond the database.

Predictably, the Alan Turing Institute found “serious ethical issues” with the NDAS, warning the program could have good intentions but “inaccurate prediction” is an ongoing concern.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Western Media Make One Death a Tragedy, Millions a Statistic

October 31, 2018

Western Media Make One Death a Tragedy, Millions a Statistic

The Western media coverage devoted to the murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi proves the cynical adage that one person’s death is a tragedy, while millions of deaths are a mere statistic.

During the past four weeks since Khashoggi went missing at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, the case has been constantly in the news cycle. Contrast that with the sparse coverage in Western news media of the horrific Saudi war in Yemen during the past four years.

The United Nations has again recently warned that 16 million in Yemen were facing death from starvation as a result of the war waged on that country by Saudi Arabia and its Gulf Arab partners, with the crucial military support of the US, Britain and France. That imminent death toll hardly registered a response from Western media or governments.

Last week, some 21 Yemeni workers at a vegetable packing plant near the Red Sea port of Hodeida were killed after US-backed Saudi warplanes launched air strikes. Again, hardly any condemnation was registered by Western governments and media pundits.

Admittedly, some politicians in the US and Europe are lately expressing disdain over the Saudi-led war and the possible culpability of Western governments in crimes against humanity.

Nevertheless, in proportion to the public concern devoted to the killing of Jamal Khashoggi there is a staggering indifference in relation to Yemen. How is possible that the fate of one man can provoke so much emotion and angst, while millions of children in Yemen appear to be shrugged off as “collateral damage”.

Partly, the circumstances of Khashoggi’s murder by a Saudi death squad are more easily visualized.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics: How the US Weaponizes Them to Accuse China of Debt Trap Diplomacy

October 16, 2018

Lies, Damn Lies & Statistics: How the US Weaponizes Them to Accuse China of Debt Trap Diplomacy

With China and Russia named as the two greatest threats to continuing American hegemony end of last year, the velvet gloves have come off the Washington establishment, baring their knuckles against the Middle Kingdom in plain view of the entire world. In recent weeks, anti-China rhetorics and vitriol emanating from the Oval Office and Capitol Hill have reached feverish, even hysterical, proportions.

The total warfare on all fronts is being waged against Beijing, assisted and amplified by the corporate media. The empire’s propaganda machine is in overdrive, churning out fake news and lies on a 24/7 basis to smear and demonize China. One of such lies is the alleged neo-colonization of developing countries through debt traps sprung by China.

This article puts together all the numbers in four countries – Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Maldives and Malaysia – which are misrepresented by the western press as victims of China’s “debt trap diplomacy”.

SRI LANKA

Lie : Western media have spun tall tales that Sri Lanka, with Chinese loans up to its eyeballs, used 90% of government revenue to service Chinese debts and was forced to “cough up a port” to Beijing.

Fact : China accounted for only ONE-EIGHTH of Sri Lanka’s $65 billion debts. Beijing didn’t demand immediate payment of loans falling due from Colombo. Instead, China acceded to Sri Lanka’s request to restructure the loans. Colombo OFFERED to settle the loans past due by giving a 70% equity in the LOSS-MAKING Hambantota port to a Chinese company. To bring the port up to the operational level, the Chinese company has to spend another $700 million. No competing offer from other parties to take over the port was received before and after the restructuring proposal was completed.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We Should Ditch GDP as a Measure of Economic Activity

October 9, 2018

WE SHOULD DITCH GDP AS A MEASURE OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY

This article exposes the false economic concepts behind GDP, which is only the visible tip of a large iceberg of economic deceit. Describing an increase in GDP as economic growth owes its meagre validity to imprecise definition. An economy does not grow, only the quantity of fiat currency deployed grows. A successful economy progresses our condition, our wealth, our standards of living. The evolution of misleading statistics such as GDP to their current condition is only governed by their usefulness to governments, not as an objective development of sound theory by seekers of truth.

There are perhaps two plausible reasons for producing the GDP statistic, other than employing statisticians, and both have nothing to do with economics. By compiling the figures, a government keeps track of its tax base, and it can enter into the game of my-country-is-bigger-than-yours.

In international comparisons of economic performance, gross domestic product adjusted for price inflation is the most common metric used. Countries are ranked by size, and success is measured by the rate of growth in GDP. This is important to the political class.

About two years ago, I was told that the Indonesian central bank had a plan to do away with cash entirely, because it would bring unrecorded transactions into Indonesia’s GDP, promoting it from sixteenth to perhaps the thirteenth largest nation measured by GDP. I have no idea if this was true, but allegedly, this was important to the Indonesian government.

We should not be surprised if going cashless is partly motivated to give the illusion of GDP growth, in the same way that in 2014 the EU decided to add in estimated contributions from prostitution and drug dealing. These are examples of why and how GDP is manipulated to produce a goal-sought answer.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Strong GDP Data and Individuals’ Wellbeing

September 26, 2018

STRONG GDP DATA AND INDIVIDUALS’ WELLBEING

In the New York Times September 14 2018 in an article – We’re Measuring The Economy All Wrong, the writer of the article David Leonhardt complains that despite strong gross domestic product data (GDP) most people don’t feel it. The writer of the article argues that,

The trouble is that a handful of statistics dominate the public conversation about the economy despite the fact that they provide a misleading portrait of people’s lives. Even worse, the statistics have become more misleading over time.

According to the accepted rules of thumb, recessions are about at least two quarters of negative growth in real gross domestic product (GDP). Recessions, according to this way of thinking, are seen as something associated with the so-called strength of the economy. The stronger an economy is the less likely it is to fall into a recession. The major cause of recessions is seen as various shocks, such as a sharp increase in the price of oil or some disruptive political events, or natural disasters or a sudden fall in consumer outlays on goods and services. Obviously then, if an economy is strong enough to cope with these shocks then recessions can be prevented, or at least made less painful. For instance, a well-managed company with a well-managed inventory is likely to withstand the effects of various shocks versus a poorly managed company.

Severity of a recession and the strength of the economy

We suggest that recessions are not about two quarters of negative growth in real GDP, or declines in various economic indicators as such. They are also not about successful inventory management. We would suggest that recessions are not about how resilient an economy is to various external and internal shocks.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Employment Report Has Become Orwellian In The Extreme

September 12, 2018

The Employment Report Has Become Orwellian In The Extreme

“Today’s job numbers might be the biggest disaster I’ve ever seen reported. This Fall could get real ugly real fast. The deterioration of the participation rate is so big it makes me suspicious of earlier numbers.” – John Titus, producer of Best Evidencevideos.

Titus goes on to say, “”The Household Survey” is showing a net loss of 1.47 million jobs year-over-year and a Labor Force reduction north of 2 million [YoY]. CNBC headline: ‘Economy adds more jobs than expected.’”

The employment report is unquestionably the most manipulated economic report issued by the Government. The content of the the headline on which the mainstream media bases its broadcast and analysis of the report is entirely disconnected from the actual data contained in the report. The damning data that no one in the financial media or Wall Street seems to be able to find is at the top of the BLS’ report:

As you can see, the “civilian labor force”declined by 469,000 people in August from July. The number of “employed” dropped 423,000. The “not in labor force” increased by nearly 700,000. With these facts in mind (“facts” at least as far as the BLS numbers contain any shards of credibility), how can the Government claim that 201,000 “jobs were created” in August? How can CNBC say the “economy created more jobs than expected?” Based on the numbers in the details of the BLS report, it looks like, between the decline in the number of people employed and the decline in those not counted as part of the labor force, the economy shed over 1 million jobs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

ean?

Erasing Flint’s Water Crisis: Or How to Lie With Statistics

July 26, 2018

Erasing Flint’s Water Crisis: Or How to Lie With Statistics

Photo by Pete Souza | CC BY 2.0

Mark Twain famously wrote that “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” This insight is relevant to examining the apologetics of modern-day academics in the rising neoliberal assault on the public. This subservience to power is evident in efforts to rationalize governmental attacks on the most basic of human needs: access to clean water. In seeking to numb the public to basic facts and reality, the New York Times has published an op-ed analysis piece by Hernán Gómez and Kim Dietrich: “The Children of Flint Were Not Poisoned” (7/22/2018).

On the face of it, many might take the above piece seriously in light of its prestigious source. It was published in the most prominent, influential newspaper in the country – the national “paper of record.” Furthermore, the authors are trained experts in their fields, Gómez an “associate professor” of emergency medicine” at the University of Michigan, Dietrich a “professor of epidemiology and environmental health” at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine. Furthermore, Gómez’s research on Flint has gone through the peer review process, as seen in the publication of his article, “Blood Lead Levels of Children in Michigan: 2006-2016” in The Journal of Pediatrics. Scholarly peer review is designed to guarantee the highest possible quality of scholarly and medical research, although in this case it appears that the process badly broke down in relation to the study of water in Flint.

Before discussing the New York Time’s claims, it is worth briefly reviewing the history of what happened in Flint, Michigan. In a country where people’s historical memory is notoriously short, many may have forgotten exactly what happened in this tragic case. To provide some context, Michigan Republican Governor Rick Snyder declared an emergency takeover of Flint’s financial management in November of 2011, citing the city’s fiscal mismanagement and its lack of revenues to provide for basic services.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

A Made In Canada Recession Story!

June 21, 2018

A Made In Canada Recession Story!

The Canadian economy lost 7,500 jobs last month (May), and unemployment was still at 5.8%. This, despite analyst forecasts that the country would likely add roughly 22,000 jobs to the economy. Rewind to the previous monthly jobs report (April). Analysts had predicted that we would add approximately 20,000 jobs to the economy, yet we ended the month losing 1,100 of them instead. Could this be a precursor to what recessions are made up of – gradually snowballing unemployment?

Telling Stats

While pundits watching these statistics through rose coloured glasses tell us not to worry because unemployment is still just at 8.5%, other predictions paint a different picture. Current Canadian unemployment forecasts for the immediate future indicate that things are likely to get bad, before they get worse. Unemployment is expected to tick up to 6% in Q3-2018, and balloon up to 6.7% in 2020.

What Canadian’s should be more concerned about is the Labour Participation Rate – a number that tells us what percentage of individuals continue to actively participate in the workforce. After maintaining a steady pace of 65.5% in Jan, Feb and March 2018, the participation rate has seen a steady decline to 65.4% and 65.3% in April and May.

What’s even more telling is the fact that there was a decline in steady, stable full-time employment. It was part-time workers that filled the void and brought our unemployment rate to where it is today. Those part-time positions are “precarious” at best, and that could evaporate at any time. And that would add to the already stressful state of our economy.

Taking Stock

Stock markets of any country are considered bellwethers of the economy. A booming stock market indicates prosperity, while a slump in the stock market usually spells trouble. Most recessions in the past have been heralded via massive declines in stock indices. So far, Canada’s premier stock market index – the S&P/TSX Composite Index – is up by 5.85% on a Quarter-to-Date (QTD) basis. So, this bodes well for Canada, doesn’t it?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Chasing the Wind

June 17, 2018

Chasing the Wind

Futility with Purpose

Plebeians generally ignore the tact of their economic central planners. They care more that their meatloaf is hot and their suds are cold, than about any plans being hatched in the capital city. Nonetheless, the central planners know an angry mob, with torches and pitchforks, are only a few empty bellies away. Hence, they must always stay on point.

Watch for those pitchfork bearers – they can get real nasty and then heads often roll quite literally. [PT]

One of the central aims of central planners is to achieve effective public exhortation. While they pursue futility, in practice. They must do so with focus and purpose.

For example, economic reports with impressive tables and charts, including pie graphs, are important to maintaining the requisite public perception. Central planners know that financial scientism must always be employed as early and often as possible.

Statistics, with per annum projections, particularly those that show increasing exports and decreasing imports, are critical to maintaining the proper narrative. The USA’s embarrassing deficit in the balance of international payments will certainly diminish if it is sketched accordingly in an “official” report… right?

Yet the planners always disregard the simple observation that an economy is composed of countless, and variable, inputs. How is a new discovery or technology, and its effect on investment and labor, to be anticipated and forecast? How are the actions of 7 billion individuals to be modeled and displayed on a tidy diagram?

Good old Friedrich A. Hayek – depicted above – once coined the term “scientism” to describe the futile attempts of assorted social engineers and their academic advisors to express human action in the form of barren mathematical equations and statistics. Lettuce look at something one of his followers, the late Professor Austin L. Hughes, wrote in an article published in the autumn 2012 issue of “The New Atlantis” journal:

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is the U.S. in a depression? (How John Williams became America’s most important statistician)

June 10, 2018

Is the U.S. in a depression? (How John Williams became America’s most important statistician)

America’s economy has been progressing steadily. First quarter real GDP growth came in 2.2%. The official unemployment rate is 3.8%. Inflation, according to the Fed’s preferred measure is 2%.

But how accurate are those numbers?

“Nonsensical,” says John Williams, founder of Shadow Government Statistics, who has been tracking U.S. government data for more than three decades.

Williams reckons that, using traditional calculation methodologies, true inflation is likely running above 6% and the unemployment rate over 20%.

Most importantly, Williams’ calculations suggest that the US economy has been in a two decade-long depression. His line of reasoning is worth a look.

Underestimating inflation

Williams argues that U.S. statistical agencies overestimate GDP data by underestimating the inflation deflator they use in the calculation.

Manipulating the inflation rate, Williams argues in Public Comment on Inflation Measurement , also enables the US government to pay out pensioners less than they were promised, by fudging cost of living adjustments.

This manipulation has ironically taken place quite openly over decades, as successive Republican and Democratic administrations made “improvements” in the way they calculated the data.

These adjustments (such as hedonic adjustments to inflation calculations, or not counting people who have stopped looking for work as part of the labor force) inevitably cast the government’s numbers in a more favorable light.

However, mainstream media journalists tend to have a poor grasp of mathematics. They were thus unable to grasp the depth of the problem, let alone explain the issues to the public.

Politicians have thus been able to fudge economic data openly. For example, the chart below shows U.S. GDP growth as measured by official sources.

The following chart (produced by Williams) shows GDP growth as calculated using a GDP deflator, corrected for an approximately two percentage point understatement.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Hiding the Real Number of Unemployed

June 8, 2018

Hiding the Real Number of Unemployed

Photo by James Lee | CC BY 2.0

Your government believes that exhausting your unemployment benefits is a cause for celebration — because you are no longer unemployed!

Huh? Well, there is a slight of hand here. Only working people who are receiving unemployment benefits are counted as “unemployed” in official statistics issued by countries around the world. Thus the actual unemployment rates are much higher than the “official” rates, generally about twice as high. Most governments make it difficult to find the actual rate, and the corporate media does its part by reporting the official rate as if that includes everybody.

Then there is the matter of how much of a given national population is actually engaged in paid employment, another useful number difficult to discover. Finally, we can consider wages, both how fast they might be rising as compared to inflation and whether they are increasing in concert with increases in productivity.

To cut to the chase, things ain’t so hot. But you already knew that, didn’t you?

Let’s start our global survey with the United States, where, contrary to expectations, the real unemployment figure is easier to discover that most other places. Perhaps the Trump régime hasn’t gotten around to suppressing it, busy as it is hiding scientific evidence about global warming, pollution and other inconvenient facts. The official U.S. unemployment rate for May was reported as 3.8 percent, the lowest it has been in several years, and less than half of what it was during the post-2008 economic collapse. Predictably, the Trump administration was quick to take credit, although the trend of falling employment has carried on for eight years now.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

“GDP Growth Driving Rates Higher!” – Is That True?

February 24, 2018

“GDP Growth Driving Rates Higher!” – Is That True?

“Peter Cook is the author of the‘Is That True?’ series of articles, which help explain the many statements and theories circulating in the mainstream financial media often presented as “truths.” The motives and psychology of market participants, which drives the difference between truth and partial-truth, are explored.”

Summing up the current conventional wisdom:

Global GDP growth has bottomed and is accelerating systematically higher,
Which will cause the inflation rate to accelerate higher.
Bond markets hate higher inflation, so interest rates have bottomed and will move even higher.
The stock market, dependent on low rates for high valuations, will fall if rates move higher,
Which is why the stock market peaked on January 26, 2018, and then declined dramatically,
Ushering in an era of systematically higher volatility

In this article, we will investigate the data behind the first three assertions related to GDP growth, inflation, and the bond market and offer explanations that differ from the conventional wisdom. Next Friday, we will continue this theme with a discussion of the following three assertions.

Global GDP Growth Is Accelerating

Unless GDP can be exported from another planet to Earth, the main drivers of global GDP growth are in four large economic zones. Here are the past 30 years of GDP growth in the U.S……

The past ten years in China……

The past 20 years in Europe…..

and Japan.

In summary, each of the main economic zones are growing at lower rates than they did 10-20 years ago. While they are each trending slightly higher after bouncing off recent troughs in early 2016, all are well within a range established since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics…And The CPI

February 16, 2018

Lies, Damned Lies, And Statistics…And The CPI

The first three of those words are attributed to the British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, and also sometimes associated with Mark Twain.

You know our skepticism of most government data, especially the BLS calculation of inflation in consumer goods and services. The data are so massaged by seasonal and hedonic adjustments, and even full-blown methodological revamps when the numbers do not fit the objectives of the government, they just don’t reflect reality.

Go back to 1982 when the BLS came up with the concept of “owner’s equivalent rent (OER),” a large component of how the price of shelter is calculated in the CPI. This was in response to the government believing rising housing prices were distorting the true cost of housing. Houses were then recategorized as capital goods. The data for OER is not hard, not a real world data point that can be measured, such as egg prices.

A friend pointed out the following in today’s Wall Street Journal today,

A monthly measure of what households pay for everything except gasoline and food rose a seasonally adjusted 0.349% in January—the strongest one-month increase since March 2005—driven by broad-based increases in costs like rent, clothing and medical services. – WSJ, February 15

We wonder out loud about the 0.349 percent print. Round it down, Charlie Brown!

Just another 0.001 percent and the BLS would have posted a core CPI monthly change of 0.4 instead of the 0.3 percent. The market response?

The headline number print of 0.5 percent was also very close to its rounding point. Going out three more decimals, the number was .5448 percent. Another 0.0012 percent, headline CPI prints at 0.6 percent.

Could they have?

Bureaucrats day trading (the data not securities) the monthly economic data? The word comes down from on high not to kill Goldilocks with RoundUp?

You decide.

File this one under all things rigged and don’t cry for me, Argentina!

Can We Ascertain the Facts of Reality in Economics by Means of Mathematics?

February 5, 2018

CAN WE ASCERTAIN THE FACTS OF REALITY IN ECONOMICS BY MEANS OF MATHEMATICS?

It is generally held that by means of statistical and mathematical methods one can organize historical data into a useful body of information, which in turn can serve as the basis for the assessments of the state of the economy. It is also held that the knowledge secured from the assessment of the data is likely to be of a tentative nature since it is not possible to know the true nature of the facts of reality.

Some thinkers such as Milton Friedman held that since it is not possible to establish “how things really work,” then it does not really matter what the underlying assumptions of a theory are. On this way of thinking, what matters is that the theory can yield good predictions.

According to Friedman,

The ultimate goal of a positive science is the development of a theory or hypothesis that yields valid and meaningful (i.e., not truistic) predictions about phenomena not yet observed…. The relevant question to ask about the assumptions of a theory is not whether they are descriptively realistic, for they never are, but whether they are sufficiently good approximation for the purpose in hand. And this question can be answered only by seeing whether the theory works, which means whether it yields sufficiently accurate predictions.^[1]

For instance, an economist forms a view that consumer outlays on goods and services are determined by disposable income. Based on this view he forms a model, which is then validated by means of statistical methods. The model is then employed in the assessments of the future direction of consumer spending.

If the model fails to produce accurate forecasts, it is either replaced, or modified by adding some other explanatory variables.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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