As I sort of mentioned in this rambling post made after a recent pub visit, economic policy based on shitty theory can’t be effective, whether its aims are noble or not. It’s like playing Mario Kart with the wrong controllers – you can make stuff happen, but you can’t choose what will happen, and the nature of the game means you’re far more likely to lose than to win.
Hitching real-world decisions to synthetic constructs like CPI is an open invitation for this. The argument given for switching to this different, even more abstract construct is that it would work out cheaper; but just saying that out loud ought to ring alarm bells, regardless of your politics (and as I understand it it’s an Obama-administration idea). If you find yourself implementing policy change by changing the definition of reality, then you obviously don’t have any faith in your supposed picture of reality, so why are you using it.
I’m sure the statisticians who came up with the new metric were acting in good faith, and there are plenty of reasons to try to measure this stuff. But the very fact that this work is ongoing tells us it’s not a suitable basis for life-and-death decisions.
The level of benefits should be based on whether they are enough: whether they are preventing evictions / bankruptcies / etc. Except, benefit-cutting politicians would then have to put an explicit number on how many dead kids each dollar saved is worth. So instead we use dubious theories about how much should be enough, and if you can’t live as frugally as the people in the made-up story, that’s your fault for being such a scumbag. But this euphemism doesn’t really fool anyone, and it makes it hard for anyone to improve the situation even if they want to, because the available levers don’t actually work.
