Heads of Official Statistics Bureaux has been subjected to suspicion and sometimes prosecution from their governments in the recent past, the most notable cases being Agentina with Graciela Bevacqua and Greece (with Andreas Georgiou), while the ASA and the ISI expressed deep concern this year about the dismissal of Dominik Rozkrut as President of Statistics Poland. Now this undemocratic tide against the independence of official statistics has reached America, with Agent Orange firing the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because he did not like the (un)employment report!! Rather than reflecting on the massive impact on the economy of his own, chaotic, economic decisions and counter-decisions.
“What do we do when the president of the United States behaves [like a 5-year-old]? On Friday, President Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics — the nation’s workaday scorekeeper of employment, wages and productivity. Why? Because the data didn’t make Mr. Trump look good. The statistics were inconvenient. So the president didn’t just challenge the findings; he fired the statistician. That’s not governing. That’s board flipping (…) One danger certainly is that a future Bureau of Labor Statistics head might feel political pressure to fudge a jobs report. The deeper risk is cynicism, the quiet corrosion of faith in institutions. If we can’t believe the numbers, how do we believe anything?” f, Aug. 3
