U.S. System of Statistics Is Envy of the World
Rarely has The Times published commentary as misinformed and confused as Michael Schrage’s “U.S. Should Privatize Economic Statistics” (Times Board of Advisors, July 27). In his thoughtless haste to condemn the federal reporting of statistics as a “virtual monopoly” that indulges in the “idiocy of national aggregation,” Mr. Schrage wonders why the government continues to have a role in national econometric statistics that perhaps made sense a century ago but that now, in a global economy, seem outmoded and inefficient.
He might be interested to know that the federal reporting of statistics did not exist “a hundred years ago,” that, in fact, it started after World War I, that it was initiated because of the determination of a crusading secretary of commerce (who himself was a rags-to-riches millionaire) to make a free-market competitive system work by the unhindered and honest distribution of information by a central authority, and that the system of reporting he created quickly became (and remains) the envy of virtually all governments around the world. (By the way, that Cabinet officer was no proponent of big government or creeping socialism. A powerful figure in the Republican Party and a future president, his name was Herbert Hoover.)
As for the specifics of Mr. Schrage’s notion that the way to fix the alleged flaws and inefficiencies of governmental statistics is by allowing a “free market” to emerge in the estimation and calculation of information, one wonders why he only mentions, by way of example, the consumer price index.
Why not privatize the census? Imagine: Only those who subscribed to private census surveys would be included in each periodic canvass. Given that the poor would most likely be unable to enroll because of their meager resources, the virtue of this idea is that it would eliminate the problem of poverty by allowing a “deregulated econometric apparatus” to avoid the chore of having to count them.
MICHAEL A. BERNSTEIN
Associate Professor and Department Chair
Department of History
UC San Diego
La Jolla
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