Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mistermann | Hacker News Reader

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> I've worked as an economist at one of those government agencies. They are filled with keen PhD / MSc economists looking to bust kartels and find collusion.

There is the skillset of the employees, and then there is what management allows employees to work on. A decade or so ago, a Statistics Canada senior manager was interviewed and claimed as fact that they were unable to reproduce an Excel model that analyzed the % of real estate sales to recent immigrants to Canada, one that an individual CRA team (one person I suspect, it's not complicated) in Richmond BC had done a few years before.

At the same time, they were given additional budget of many millions of dollars to accomplish this task and other things. They did not accomplish the task.

> Proving collusion...

The government has tipped their hand already as far as I'm concerned. I don't expect anything would ever be proven, I just want to see as much evidence as possible to help me decide what I am going to believe - I'm certainly not going to take epistemic advice from anyone in the Canadian government.

Totally get your point between individual skill / trust and the agency level. In my little country we had a recent event where a governement agency, pretty much failing for the last 20 years, but especially pronounced the last 5 years suddenly came clear in a PR-move. What? Turns out a newspaper had succeeded in a neatly tuned FOIA-request (local equivalent) and forced their hand. At the same moment a vote was underway for extra budget, looking to fail. So the sudden transparency was really pretty ugly.

Surrounding collusion. I can’t tell you what to believe, but keep in mind that there are a lot of reasons why correlated moves in prices can occur without communication. Lots literature in industrial organization (the field of why markets have particular ordening and how actors behave on markets) on signaling. A though experiment might be the games of poker versus bridge on explicit vs implicit signaling / coordination.

If we were actually serious here, we could introduce a variety of ideas into this conversation that would provide very interesting insight into what is going on in this thread, and in the realms surrounding these allegations...just one of them is this:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption

It would be fun if this fellow's initiative actually got some traction, and attention, and then out of the blue they launched a new educational section of their website to assist the public (and journalists...or not) in their thinking on such matters.

I suspect these giant retailers have a risk department, and at least some people in that department would be able to recognize that which the general public and participants in this thread lack the ability to recognize.

Can you put a link to the story about the Stats Canada manager? There was a story a few years ago about a Stats Canada employee who could not reproduce a model because of confidentiality reasons within CRA, but certainly you wouldn’t be getting confidentiality and privacy mixed up with competence. Can you put up a link?

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/british-columbia/arti...

That article covers the initial report, not the subsequent claim that they do not have the ability to reproduce it.

> But the report was not made public until a five-year access-to-information battle concluded recently.

This demonstrates that Canadian democracy does not rule according to the will of the people - there was never a referendum on whether the government should hide the truth from citizens.

> Of the 46 houses bought in Burnaby, staff found 72 per cent were purchased by new arrivals to Vancouver who reported an average total family income of just $16,000.

Immigrate to Canada, enjoy all of its world class (at least formerly) social services, but pay no income taxes. Also not the will of the people.

Hanlon's Razor seems to be the guiding principle of journalists, and the general public in general. Gosh, I wonder if our educational curriculum (or lack of specific content) has anything to do with this state of affairs. Note also who it is that determines curriculum.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor

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