[expat2]

“The culture of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is so strong that it’s not going to happen.”

That is BS. I had a golfing buddy a while back who was a PhD mathematician at BLS. And even then there was intense pressure from the political appointees to adjust the numbers to look better.

“after [left-wing] academic economists did decades of research and said they should be done.” My addition in [].

[expat_panama]

...intense pressure from the political appointees to adjust the numbers...

Interesting; at the same time this proves other things--

• there still are some career BLS people who care about econ more than politics,
• they were at times able to report hard numbers embarrassing the political hacks,
• they did not budge until the political pressure became intense,
• we can still figure out a lot when we understand how contradictions in data output have been distorted by political pressure.

The BLS is fairly transparent with their methodology so it's not that hard to find out what the story really is.  Very different from say, the BEA or worse the Census Br. where they got freer reign to fudge.