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Comment by hudibras | Hacker News Reader

Shadowstats is a huge scam site. Their methodology is to to take the official government numbers (unemployment, inflation, whatever) and add an arbitrary constant to it to make the numbers more attractive to right-wingers so that they'll fork over the annual fee to get "the real story."

I'm not exaggerating, that's their entire shtick.

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I suspect you're exaggerating at least a tiny bit, since the difference between their unemployment rate and the official figure is not constant: theirs has been trending up over the past 4 years, while the official figures are going down.

As an example, if you look closely at the alternative unemployment chart that rayiner linked to [0] you can see that the shadowstats line (blue) exactly matches the U6 line (grey) down to the very last wiggle. Until 2010, that is, when unemployment started going down and shadowstats needed to keep people shelling out $175 a year.

[0] http://www.shadowstats.com/alternate_data/unemployment-chart...

It looks like they may have added some growing possibly linear function to the unemployment rate instead of a constant starting in 2009. All the better to push their fear mongering agenda/sales tactic I guess.

Actually not correct.

They report inflation and other economic figures using the methods that the government previously used before "moving the goalposts" in order to report more "convenient" numbers.

This blog post gives a good summary of shadowstats's work on CPI. http://azizonomics.com/2013/06/01/the-trouble-with-shadowsta...

Basically, they think (without evidence) that the government has moved the goalposts so they add an arbitrary number to the official number. They specifically do NOT recalculate the CPI based on old methodology; the shadowstats guy admits this in the blog post.

Can't help mentioning this Paul Krugman post from last month, where he points out that annual subscription to shadowstats has remained the same price for the past 8 years. So much for hyperinflation...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/19/always-inflation...

nice summary. I believe the billion prices project has become http://www.pricestats.com/us-series Unfortunately It looks like we are going negative again.

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