{"id":183760,"date":"2012-11-29T22:51:00","date_gmt":"2012-11-30T03:51:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/11\/29\/a-lesson-in-economic-statistics-from-the-shrill-one\/"},"modified":"2012-11-29T22:51:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-30T03:51:00","slug":"a-lesson-in-economic-statistics-from-the-shrill-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2012\/11\/29\/a-lesson-in-economic-statistics-from-the-shrill-one\/","title":{"rendered":"A Lesson in Economic Statistics from the Shrill One"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/i990.photobucket.com\/albums\/af27\/msaroff\/112612krugman1-blog480.jpg\" style=\"cursor: pointer; float: right; margin: 0px 0px 10px 10px;\" width=\"350\" \/>Paul Krugman explains why <a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2012\/11\/28\/more-about-italy\/\">Italian productivity has fallen precipitously over the past decade or so<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Dean Baker, in correspondence, makes an interesting point about the mysterious productivity collapse in Italy \u2014 namely, that a big chunk of it could be a statistical illusion. This is always something you should consider when you see something strange in economic data.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span> <span style=\"color: blue;\">Here\u2019s the story: Italy, with its combination of extensive regulations and weak enforcement, used to have a lot of \u201cblack labor\u201d \u2014 workers who weren\u2019t on the books, so as to evade various government-imposed requirements. But then came reforms that made keeping part-time workers, etc., on the books less onerous \u2014 and the hidden labor came into the open. Measured GDP wasn\u2019t affected, because statisticians were already making imputations for the shadow economy; so the result was a decline in measured productivity.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>It&#8217;s a reasonable explanation.&nbsp; It&#8217;s not like Italy has stopped being Italy since 1995.<\/p>\n<p>Entering the Euro zone has brought changes, but nothing that would have their actual productivity dropping off a cliff like this graph pr0n.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Paul Krugman explains why Italian productivity has fallen precipitously over the past decade or so: Dean Baker, in correspondence, makes an interesting point about the mysterious productivity collapse in Italy \u2014 namely, that a big chunk of it could be a statistical illusion. This is always something you should consider when you see something strange &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,984,992],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-europe","category-statistics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183760"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}