I am Brent Moulton and I worked in the federal statistical system for 32 years—at BLS from 1985 to 1997, and at BEA from 1997 to December 2016. I'm now retired and am blogging to help explain official statistics and to keep abreast of the changes that are happening.
I have BA and MS degrees in economics from Brigham Young University and a PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. (The late Arnold Zellner was the chair of my thesis committee.) My most widely cited publications were a couple articles on the effects of clustering on standard errors. During the 1990s I was head of price research at BLS during the Boskin Commission era. While at BEA I was head of the national accounts program and was involved in the 2008 SNA update.
Americans routinely turn to numbers for evaluating the state of the economy and social conditions. In particular, we rely on the accuracy and integrity of official statistics. While U.S. official statistics are not perfect, they are widely considered to be impartial measures that are prepared in a professional and objective manner. The accuracy of the U.S. …
Read More The Integrity of Official Statistics – What’s Needed
When Canadians look for official statistics, there’s one agency, Statistics Canada, that provides basically all of them. In the United States, on the other hand, we have a hodgepodge of agencies—the Bureau of Justice Statistics for data on crime and law enforcement, the Bureau of Transportation Statistics for data on transportation, the National Center for …
Read More Understanding the U.S. Statistical System
We live and make decisions in a world of easy access to data. While much attention is devoted to how we draw inferences from data, relatively little is given to how public data are created, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how they can be improved. Welcome to my new blog, which is devoted …
Read More Introducing Political Arithmetick