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Comment by jeffbee | Hacker News Reader

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You can read it directly from Secretary of the Treasury to Bill Clinton, and the Director of the National Economic Council to Barak Obama.

https://twitter.com/LHSummers/status/1762607548828360798

So the number still looks like 18%, even when you take out the attacks on the author of the article who was accurately reporting what Summers said.

It is at least a bipartisan hobby, to go searching for any alternative numbers whenever there's good news for your opponent.

Though this is an impressive amping up: "previous" is 1983. This isn't some dastardly bit of math by the present administration. This dates back to Reagan.

Of more interest is that consumer sentiment is indeed grumpy, and that is a big deal with an election coming up. They don't really need this guy coming up with mendacious explanations for it.

Searching for alternative numbers to explain an anomaly, e.g. that consumer sentiment hasn't improved even though inflation is down, is what scientists do, although it is certainly not immune to partisan bias. Have you got a critique of the paper's explanation and an example of how you think it's mendacious? The original is here: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32163. I don't have access, but the Forbes story says they check their result in Europe and it continues to hold.

mendacious explanations

What specific lie are you calling out here?

The fact that he hasn't described all possible formulas, but instead included exactly the one that affirms his known preconceptions. He would not have published this thesis had it not supported him. He'd have looked around for some other metric.

So you didn't mean mendacious?

https://paulgraham.com/simply.html

This absolutely reads like a reasoned counterpoint to a dubious claim and totally not at all like an unhinged, partisan knee-jerk rejection of additional information that's bad news for your preferred platform.

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