Word: indexes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Some, like the Consumer Price Index, are limited but fairly consistent and reliable estimates, while others, such as retail sales, inventories and quarterly productivity figures, are little better than ballpark guesses. One of the weakest is the index of leading indicators, which is supposed to foreshadow economic trends. Often the Commerce Department releases preliminary figures that give false signals and then, like Stalin rewriting history, subjects the numbers to revision after revision. Statistics can be made to dance to almost any tune, depending on how they are presented, particularly at year's end. Warns Economist Walter Heller...
...Telephone operators, bellmen and maids were given lists of VIPS' names. Since the Hilton could accommodate only 2,400 of the delegates, the less important visitors had to be discreetly dispersed among other nearby first-class hotels. A.T.A. staffers spent 250 hours compiling 2-in. by 4-in. index cards with information on each member and each supplier, his company, even his wife. Thus the planners ensured that at the daily luncheons in the Grand Ballroom, trucking-company executives were strategically interspersed with suppliers' representatives; competitive firms were well separated...
...look at the latest doleful statistics. The consumer price index in October rose at a compound annual rate of 10% for the second month in a row. Food and beverages jumped at a rate of 10%, housing 12.7% and gasoline 18.2%. For the first time the overall index went above the 200 mark, meaning that today's battered dollar buys only half what it did in 1967, when the big price leaps began to pay for the Viet Nam War. In terms of real, aftertax buying power, many Americans are earning less now than they did then...
...recruit contributors, the TM organization uses a videotape of Convict Corum talking by phone to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the guru from India who brought TM to Europe and the U.S. TM organizers are also putting together an index of rehabilitation, though there is some doubt that parole boards would-or should-judge an inmate ready for release on the basis of things like improved alpha and theta brain waves. Penal authorities are more likely to be persuaded by the support TM has so far given parolees through free counseling at the 80 TM centers around the state...
...Washington, D.C. A career civil servant, Shiskin worked in the Census Bureau and the Office of Management and Budget before being appointed to his last post by President Nixon in 1973. Respected and apolitical, the BLS chief was reappointed by President Carter last year. Finding the consumer price index too narrowly based, Shiskin worked out new formulas to better gauge the costs of U.S. goods and services...