Hackification

Arendt’s Law comes for economic data

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On Monday I wrote about Donald Trump’s disastrous press conference touting the economy along with Stephen Moore, a former chief economist at the Heritage Foundation. As I noted, Moore is a dishonest partisan hack, which is only to be expected, but also bizarrely incompetent, incapable of ever getting his facts right. To explain the phenomenon, I invoked Hannah Arendt:

Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.

Let me call this Arendt’s Law: Totalitarian and wannabe totalitarian regimes only hire incompetent hacks.

So when Trump nominated E.J. Antoni, the current chief economist at Heritage, to head the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it seemed safe to assume that he would be cut from the same cloth. But although Trump’s Truth Social post announcing the nomination declared that Antoni is a Highly Respected Economist, I and most of the economists I talk with knew nothing about him.

Fortunately, Menzie Chinn of the University of Wisconsin, who actually is a Highly Respected Economist and whose blog Econbrowser has been influential for many years, has been on Antoni’s case for a while. And sure enough, Arendt’s Law remains undefeated.

Before I get to Chinn’s work, yesterday morning’s Antoni headline. I’ve argued since before Trump took office that this administration would eventually get around to cooking the economic books. But I didn’t expect it right away. The process of constructing a monthly jobs report is complex. You can’t just take a Sharpie and write in the numbers you want. Corrupting the data would require firing or intimidating a large number of people, which would, I thought, take time.

But one should never underestimate the audacity of hacks. On Monday Antoni went on Fox Business and suggested that the BLS should stop issuing monthly jobs reports until the “problems” at the agency are fixed.

I guess that would be one way to let Trump continue claiming that the economy is booming — just stop publishing the data showing that it isn’t.

True, Antoni did say that the BLS should continue issuing quarterly reports, but scrapping monthly numbers would give Trump’s people more time to corrupt the data — and wanna bet that if the next quarterly report looks bad, Antoni, if confirmed at the BLS, would find reasons to hold off on its release?

Incidentally, as Claudia Sahm reminds us, the BLS is legally required to issue monthly employment reports. So Antoni’s proposal, aside from being a transparently corrupt attempt to hide bad news, would be flatly illegal. I’m pretty sure that canceling publication of the Consumer Price Index, which will be next on the agenda once the full impact of Trump’s tariffs is felt, would also be illegal. But does that sort of thing matter these days?

But let me get to Menzie Chinn who, as I said, has been on Antoni’s case for a while. It turns out that for someone with almost no publications, who has been largely invisible from policy discourse, Antoni has been responsible for a surprisingly large number of bad economic analyses.

Chinn puts special emphasis on a 2024 paper circulated by Antoni and Peter St. Onge claiming that real GDP peaked at the end of 2021, and never recovered — that is, that the U.S. economy was in a deep recession for Joe Biden’s last three years in office.

Chinn tried to replicate their results, and even using what they claimed was their (weird) methodology couldn’t get anywhere close to their numbers. My guess is that a forensic analysis, should anyone bother (I don’t recommend it) would find that Antoni and St. Onge committed a Stephen Moore: They just made some math mistakes or copied some numbers down incorrectly.

But why bother? An economist who gets results completely at odds with every other piece of available evidence — remember, in 2024 The Economist described the U.S. economy as “The envy of the world” — owes it both to himself and his readers to provide a detailed, reproducible explanation of why his story is so different. Antoni didn’t.

I’d like to think that Antoni’s utter professional inadequacy for the role of BLS Commissioner will keep Congress from confirming him. But as I mentioned Monday, Stephen Moore already had a well-established reputation for surreal incompetence by the time Trump tried to install him on the Federal Reserve Board. Yet he would probably have been confirmed anyway if unsavory facts about his personal life hadn’t surfaced.

So there’s a good chance that Antoni will, in fact, take over the BLS. And the result will be the total destruction of one of the world’s greatest statistical agencies — an agency that has, among other things, been a crucial aid to business decision-making. It won’t even matter whether the Trumpists cook the books (although they will.) For from the moment Antoni takes full control, nobody will believe any numbers coming out of BLS.

Fortunately, the same thing won’t be happening to other government agencies providing crucial information, like the Centers for Disease Control. Oh, wait.

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