DAMN STATISTICS….Via Suburban Guerrilla, the Boston Phoenix reports that the Bush administration is playing games with revisions to household income reports:
The reworked numbers, which will show that median after-tax household income declined far more in 2002 than the bureau reported, have been ready since January, according to sources in the agency. All that remained was to work out a “release strategy,” according to one manager in the Housing and Household Economics Statistics Division. A follow-up call in March to find out when the new numbers would be made public yielded this information from Dan Weinberg, chief of the division: the bureau still needs to establish a “release strategy.” It?s starting to look an awful lot like the “release strategy” is to not release the new numbers at all.
I’ve been in charge of “release strategies” for entire product families that were done in less than three months. I wonder what the release strategy would be if the revision showed that household income had increased more than originally reported?
