Mismeasurement and income inequality
Update: Anyone that is waiting for this, I’m sorry but I am massively swamped with work. I will do this – I need to look at this for other work of my own – however, a post may not appear until mid-March.
Just as a pointer, I see that there were some measurement errors in the income data used by Treasury, Stats NZ, and MSD. That implies that some of the work mentioned at the start of this post (the recent stuff, not the longer term research papers) will be off. (ht Rates Blog). MSD goes through matters here, I will read through what they said on the weekend.
Given how much discussion there is about these issues at the moment, this is a touchy subject – understandably. A couple of points I’ll make are that:
- Given how careful these departments are, this will be upsetting for them. I respect the fact they’ve owned up and not made any excuses. Maybe it is my recent dealings with Vodafone, where they just kept blaming other people for the fact I have to repeatedly cancel an order I made six weeks ago, but it is nice to see organisations owning up and not making any excuses.
- It is important we all try to figure out what these error mean for our understanding of the issues, and policy trade-offs.
I will try to have a post up discussing what is going on next week – and what it means for some of the things I have discussed on the blog over the past year.