Data, Availability and the Individual

One of the most interesting things I have noticed is that we now have thousands of people on blogs using real data. The St Louis FED must be inundated by users to get the data. Federal Govt sites are the worst, they make you wander about and often hide the data in pdf files. It is as if they try to keep it hidden.

But not withstanding we get it and people are finding out real things, like the numerator and denominator in unemployment. We have been arguing since 2008 that the DoL cooked the books, now people are seeing for themselves. Then they can dive down and better understand.

Yet you can tell those who get and those who don't. If they just cut and past a St Louis FED graph, well they are the amateurs. If they download the ST Louis FED data and create a new graph, they are involved with the facts, not just watchers, they have been thrown into the data, they see the process, they have that Heidegger dasein. Otherwise I would say they are passersby in lie.

As this data become more available and as people become more observant, they will soon work around the number crunchers in DC who hold forth less than truthful prognostications. This will be an interesting change.

One may they ask where are the macroeconomists in all this, just cutting and pasting!