The NBER may have been "of central importance to the development of
economics", as a contributor writes, but what does that mean, and is it
praiseworthy?
Item. Why did it fall to outsider Kevin Phillips to write "Hard numbers: the
economy is worse than you know"? (Harper's, April 2008). He exposes a
bouquet of Pollyanna biases in the CPI and the NIPA accounts introduced and
enforced by politicians seeking to inflate their performances.
Item. Why does the NBER Committee on Dating Business Cycles, long headed by
Robert Hall of the Hoover Institution, adopt such a narrow definition of
"recession" that even today, halfway into a major crash, there is still no
"official" recession.  (Who made them "official", anyway?)
Item. Why did it fall to Michael Hudson to expose the understatement of
commercial land rents in the NIPA and FRB accounts? The understatement is so
gross that the FRB showed them as actually negative. Where was NBER?
Item. Did NBER warn of the present crash? If so, please cite a source; I
haven't seen any.

Thank you,

Mason Gaffney