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The inflation statistic nobody believed

From Latin America and the Caribbean·An enduring case

After Argentina's government intervened in its statistics institute in 2007, official inflation ran far below every independent estimate for years, private economists faced fines for publishing alternatives, and the IMF censured the country over its data. Markets simply switched to unofficial numbers. Authority over a statistic proved separable from belief in it.

The concepts this raises

Each of these gives a class a different way into the same case.

PowerKnowledge and Society
The capacity to shape what counts as knowledge, who is heard, and what gets funded, published or taught. Power is not only censorship; setting an agenda, controlling a platform or being granted authority all change the knowledge that a community ends up with.
ObjectivityStatus of Knowledge
Independence from the particular standpoint of any individual knower. Objectivity is better understood as something a method or a community achieves through checks on individual bias than as something a single knower can simply decide to have.

Where it sits in the knowledge framework

Methods and tools
The practices, conventions, instruments and forms of reasoning through which knowledge here is actually made, together with the assumptions those methods build in and what they are structurally unable to detect.
Ethics
The ethical questions internal to the knowledge itself: what may be investigated and how, what obligations the knowledge places on those who hold it, and the ethical constraints the discipline imposes on its own practitioners.

Areas of knowledge

The same ideas, somewhere else

Cases that raise a concept this one raises, but in a different area of knowledge or a different part of the world. That contrast is the point: it is what shows a student the concept travels.