Thanks to Paul Krugman for citing my brief paper on EJ Antoni’s 2022 recession claim, in “Hackification”, all in the cause of exposing the abuses of data now taking place.

Krugman quotes

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.

….

… 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.

Other views, first Jason Furman:

Mr. Antoni’s posts that have shown apparent misunderstandings of import prices and the baby boom retirement have gotten the most attention and criticism, along with his statement before the nomination that the monthly jobs report should be suspended.

But even more egregious, as Alan Cole, an economist the right-leaning Tax Foundation, has pointed out, is that in October 2024 Mr. Antoni took the time to publish a report that purported to find that “the American economy has actually been in recession since 2022.” This claim was based on a concept of “adjusted real” disposable income, which was down about 2 percent from 2019 to 2024 — in contrast to the official data, which showed real disposable income up 12 percent over this period. The problem was his measure effectively double-counted housing inflation, making the inflation rate artificially higher and growth artificially lower.

Mr. Antoni’s selection has done something I have rarely seen, which is to unite a number of economists and policy wonks from across the political spectrum. The American Enterprise Institute’s Stan Veuger told The Washington Post that “he is utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.” Similar sentiments were echoed by people affiliated with conservative and libertarian think tanks, in a Wall Street Journal editorial and a National Review article.

Goldstein in a MarketWatch piece notes:

Jessica Riedl, a former Heritage Foundation research fellow now at the conservative Manhattan Institute, said his articles and tweets “are probably the most error-filled or any think tank economist right now.” Jeremy Horpedahl of the libertarian Cato Institute said he “either massively misunderstands labor market data, or he is willing to lie repeatedly about after being corrected by dozens of economists.” Stan Veuger of the American Enterprise Institute, often described as a center-right think tank, called him “utterly unqualified and as partisan as it gets.”

Politico quotes Michael Strain at AEI, on Antoni’s idea to end the monthly employment release:

Halting the monthly numbers would be a “huge disaster,” according to Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “It would signal that the agency is attempting to advance a partisan agenda. … Businesses also make lots of decisions based on the monthly data. Reducing the frequency of the data would make it much harder for them to make profitable decisions.”

Kiernan, at WSJ:

 …several independent economists said he is unqualified. “There are a lot of competent conservative economists that could do this job,” said Kyle Pomerleau, a senior fellow at the right-of-center American Enterprise Institute, in a social-media post. “E.J. is not one of them.”

Harvard University economist Jason Furman, who was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Barack Obama, said on X, “E.J. Antoni is completely unqualified to be BLS Commissioner. He is an extreme partisan and does not have any relevant experience. He would be a break from decades of nonpartisan technocrats.”

…

Installing a partisan as BLS commissioner could prove counterproductive to Trump, said Renaissance Macro Research economist Neil Dutta. If Antoni prods the agency into producing statistics that flatter the administration, the data would either not be seen as credible or would likely delay interest-rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.

“Neither of those scenarios actually works to the president’s benefit,” Dutta said.

Even the WSJ Editorial Page writers asserted:

Mr. Antoni’s commentary at Heritage has been highly partisan, but the BLS job demands nonpartisan professionalism. Last week he cited BLS survey data—yes, despite previously criticizing it as unreliable—to argue that Mr. Trump’s immigration policies have caused a surge of employment of native-born Americans as “artificially cheap labor is removed” from the economy.

The data he cited is questionable because it also shows that the native-born population over age 16 grew by 4.5 million since last December. That’s unlikely in half a year. It increased by about 1.5 million annually on average last decade and flatlined in 2023 and 2024. See the nearby chart. Perhaps immigrants told surveyors that they were born in the U.S. because they were afraid of being deported.

Few people trust China’s economic data because they know the government serves the interests of the ruling Communist Party. Mr. Antoni will have to take off his MAGA hat if he wants to ensure that the public and markets can trust BLS data.

There’s more. But for now, the most definitive piece of information you need is that Stephen Moore supports EJ Antoni.