Exactly that he doesn’t have citations! From Daily Signal:
President Donald Trump was right to fire BLS Commissioner Erika McEntarfer, a Biden appointee, for these mistakes, even if they were the result of systemic flaws, not partisanship. Antoni, whom Trump nominated as her replacement on Monday, can restore integrity and precision to our most critical economic data agency.
…
Critics claim Antoni is under-credentialed for the position. For instance, a Wednesday Wall Street Journal article unfavorably pointed out the number of academic citations Antoni has received compared to McEntarfer. Yet there’s literally no one outside the ivory tower of academia who cares about citation numbers.
The reality is that conservatives rarely climb the traditional academic ladder—not because of a lack of skill or scholarship, but because universities, especially in the social sciences, overwhelmingly deny tenure to right-leaning scholars. It’s a vicious cycle: Conservatives are shut out of faculty jobs, which in turn means they don’t accumulate the “elite” university credentials their detractors demand.
If you only measure merit by the yardstick of academia’s ideological monoculture, you’ll always find conservatives “underqualified.”
Fortunately, conservatives have set up a parallel track to liberal academia: the think tank world, where Antoni has dominated, quickly rising through the ranks to lead one of the country’s top institutions, The Heritage Foundation. Antoni’s applied policy work—outside the cloistered, naval-gazing academy—is exactly the kind of real-world credentials this job needs.
I laughed and laughed at this point. The point is not that he doesn’t have citations. In my time in government I met many extremely knowledgeable individuals w/o a single peer-reviewed journal article. The point is he has neither academic nor statistical agency experience.
One will note that the article does not rebut a single example of Dr. Antoni’s statistical errors (recounted in this WaPo article).
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Bureau of Labor Statistics data is ‘phony’
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Social safety net programs are ‘Ponzi schemes’
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Tariffs impact the import price index
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Monthly jobs report should be paused
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The Federal Reserve should be removed
Oh, and i think the three members of the Council of Economic Advisers are … PhD economists.
To recap other errors:
EJ Antoni/Heritage: “Back from the Brink: Trump’s Economy Soars Instead of Crashing”
The Great Replacement “Theory” * Comes to Economics at Heritage
EJ Antoni Redefines Recession as What the American People Feel
EJ Antoni Worries about the Gap between CES NFP and CPS Employment
Son of ShadowStats: “Government economic figures hide the truth about the economy”
Did Government Employment Account for Most of September’s Employment Gains?
Lessons in Why We Don’t Judge Recessions on the Basis of GDP
The Great Replacement “Theory” * Comes to Economics at Heritage
“we never left the recession of March 2020 and … everything has been getting gradually worse”
“Fortunately, conservatives have set up a parallel track to liberal academia: the think tank world…”
Necessitated by the fact that facts have a liberal bias. Antoni rose to the top of the right-wing think ta k worldbecause he has so little concern for facts.
The whole thing is a little-Antoni-quality defense of little Antoni.