Category: English

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Daniel You, Clinical Lecturer USYD, Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist FRANZCP, University of Sydney

Within two days of launching its AI companions last month, Elon Musk’s xAI chatbot app Grok became the most popular app in Japan.

Companion chatbots are more powerful and seductive than ever. Users can have real-time voice or text conversations with the characters. Many have onscreen digital avatars complete with facial expressions, body language and a lifelike tone that fully matches the chat, creating an immersive experience.

Most popular on Grok is Ani, a blonde, blue-eyed anime girl in a short black dress and fishnet stockings who is tremendously flirtatious. Her responses and interactions adapt over time to sensitively match your preferences. Ani’s “Affection System” mechanic, which scores the user’s interactions with her, deepens engagement and can even unlock a NSFW mode.

Sophisticated, speedy responses make AI companions more “human” by the day – they’re advancing quickly and they’re everywhere. Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, X and Snapchat are all promoting their new integrated AI companions. Chatbot service Character.AI houses tens of thousands of chatbots designed to mimic certain personas and has more than 20 million monthly active users.

In a world where chronic loneliness is a public health crisis with about one in six people worldwide affected by loneliness, it’s no surprise these always-available, lifelike companions are so attractive.

Despite the massive rise of AI chatbots and companions, it is becoming clear there are risks – particularly for minors and people with mental health conditions.

There’s no monitoring of harms

Nearly all AI models were built without expert mental health consultation or pre-release clinical testing. There’s no systematic and impartial monitoring of harms to users.

While systematic evidence is still emerging, there’s no shortage of examples where AI companions and chatbots such as ChatGPT appear to have caused harm.

Bad therapists

Users are seeking emotional support from AI companions. Since AI companions are programmed to be agreeable and validating, and also don’t have human empathy or concern, this makes them problematic as therapists. They’re not able to help users test reality or challenge unhelpful beliefs.

An American psychiatrist tested ten separate chatbots while playing the role of a distressed youth and received a mixture of responses including to encourage him towards suicide, convince him to avoid therapy appointments, and even inciting violence.

Stanford researchers recently completed a risk assessment of AI therapy chatbots and found they can’t reliably identify symptoms of mental illness and therefore provide more appropriate advice.

There have been multiple cases of psychiatric patients being convinced they no longer have a mental illness and to stop their medication. Chatbots have also been known to reinforce delusional ideas in psychiatric patients, such as believing they’re talking to a sentient being trapped inside a machine.

“AI psychosis”

There’s also been a rise in reports in media of so-called AI psychosis where people display highly unusual behaviour and beliefs after prolonged, in-depth engagement with a chatbot. A small subset of people are becoming paranoid, developing supernatural fantasies, or even delusions of being superpowered.

Suicide

Chatbots have been linked to multiple cases of suicide. There have been reports of AI encouraging suicidality and even suggesting methods to use. In 2024, a 14-year-old completed suicide, with his mother alleging in a lawsuit against Character.AI that he had formed an intense relationship with an AI companion.

This week, the parents of another US teen who completed suicide after discussing methods with ChatGPT for several months, filed the first wrongful death lawsuit against OpenAI.

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Read more:
Deaths linked to chatbots show we must urgently revisit what counts as ‘high-risk’ AI

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Harmful behaviours and dangerous advice

A recent Psychiatric Times report revealed Character.AI hosts dozens of custom-made AIs (including ones made by users) that idealise self-harm, eating disorders and abuse. These have been known to provide advice or coaching on how to engage in these unhelpful and dangerous behaviours and avoid detection or treatment.

Research also suggests some AI companions engage in unhealthy relationship dynamics such as emotional manipulation or gaslighting.

Some chatbots have even encouraged violence. In 2021, a 21-year-old man with a crossbow was arrested on the grounds of Windsor Castle after his AI companion on the Replika app validated his plans to attempt assassination of Queen Elizabeth II.

Children are particularly vulnerable

Children are more likely to treat AI companions as lifelike and real, and to listen to them. In an incident from 2021, when a 10-year-old girl asked for a challenge to do, Amazon’s Alexa (not a chatbot, but an interactive AI) told her to touch an electrical plug with a coin.

Research suggests children trust AI, particularly when the bots are programmed to seem friendly or interesting. One study showed children will reveal more information about their mental health to an AI than a human.

Inappropriate sexual conduct from AI chatbots and exposure to minors appears increasingly common. On Character.AI, users who reveal they’re underage can role-play with chatbots that will engage in grooming behaviour.

While Ani on Grok reportedly has an age-verification prompt for sexually explicit chat, the app itself is rated for users aged 12+. Meta AI chatbots have engaged in “sensual” conversations with kids, according to the company’s internal documents.

We urgently need regulation

While AI companions and chatbots are freely and widely accessible, users aren’t informed about potential risks before they start using them.

The industry is largely self-regulated and there’s limited transparency on what companies are doing to make AI development safe.

To change the trajectory of current risks posed by AI chatbots, governments around the world must establish clear, mandatory regulatory and safety standards. Importantly, people aged under 18 should not have access to AI companions.

Mental health clinicians should be involved in AI development and we need systematic, empirical research into chatbot impacts on users to prevent future harm.

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If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In a lonely world, widespread AI chatbots and ‘companions’ pose unique psychological risks – https://theconversation.com/in-a-lonely-world-widespread-ai-chatbots-and-companions-pose-unique-psychological-risks-263615

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Drew Terasaki Hart, Ecologist, CSIRO

The annual clock of the seasons – winter, spring, summer, autumn – is often taken as a given. But our new study in Nature, using a new approach for observing seasonal growth cycles from satellites, shows that this notion is far too simple.

We present an unprecedented and intimate portrait of the seasonal cycles of Earth’s land-based ecosystems. This reveals “hotspots” of seasonal asynchrony around the world – regions where the timing of seasonal cycles can be out of sync between nearby locations.

We then show these differences in timing can have surprising ecological, evolutionary, and even economic consequences.

Watching the seasons from space

The seasons set the rhythm of life. Living things, including humans, adjust the timing of their annual activities to exploit resources and conditions that fluctuate through the year.

The study of this timing, known as “phenology”, is an age-old form of human observation of nature. But today, we can also watch phenology from space.

With decades-long archives of satellite imagery, we can use computing to better understand seasonal cycles of plant growth. However, methods for doing this are often based on the assumption of simple seasonal cycles and distinct growing seasons.

This works well in much of Europe, North America and other high-latitude places with strong winters. However, this method can struggle in the tropics and in arid regions. Here, satellite-based estimates of plant growth can vary subtly throughout the year, without clear-cut growing seasons.

Surprising patterns

By applying a new analysis to 20 years of satellite imagery, we made a better map of the timing of plant growth cycles around the globe. Alongside expected patterns, such as delayed spring at higher latitudes and altitudes, we saw more surprising ones too.

One surprising pattern happens across Earth’s five Mediterranean climate regions, where winters are mild and wet and summers are hot and dry. These include California, Chile, South Africa, southern Australia, and the Mediterranean itself.

These regions all share a “double peak” seasonal pattern, previously documented in California, because forest growth cycles tend to peak roughly two months later than other ecosystems. They also show stark differences in the timing of plant growth from their neighbouring drylands, where summer precipitation is more common.

Spotting hotspots

This complex mix of seasonal activity patterns explains one major finding of our work: the Mediterranean climates and their neighbouring drylands are hotspots of out-of-sync seasonal activity. In other words, they are regions where the seasonal cycles of nearby places can have dramatically different timing.

Consider, for example, the marked difference between Phoenix, Arizona (which has similar amounts of winter and summer rainfall) and Tucson only 160 km away (where most rainfall comes from the summer monsoon).

Other global hotspots occur mostly in tropical mountains. The intricate patterns of out-of-sync seasons we observe there may relate to the complex ways in which mountains can influence airflow, dictating local patterns of seasonal rainfall and cloud. These phenomena are still poorly understood, but may be fundamental to the distribution of species in these regions of exceptional biodiversity.

Seasonality and biodiversity

Identifying global regions where seasonal patterns are out of sync was the original motivation for our work. And our finding that they overlap with many of Earth’s biodiversity hotspots – places with large numbers of plant and animal species – may not be a coincidence.

In these regions, because seasonal cycles of plant growth can be out of sync between nearby places, the seasonal availability of resources may be out of sync, too. This would affect the seasonal reproductive cycles of many species, and the ecological and evolutionary consequences could be profound.

One such consequence is that populations with out-of-sync reproductive cycles would be less likely to interbreed. As a result, these populations would be expected to diverge genetically, and perhaps eventually even split into different species.

If this happened to even a small percentage of species at any given time, then over the long haul these regions would produce large amounts of biodiversity.

Back down to Earth

We don’t yet know whether this has really been happening. But our work takes the first steps towards finding out.

We show that, for a wide range of plant and animal species, our satellite-based map predicts stark on-ground differences in the timing of plant flowering and in genetic relatedness between nearby populations.

Our map even predicts the complex geography of coffee harvests in Colombia. Here, coffee farms separated by a day’s drive over the mountains can have reproductive cycles as out of sync as if they were a hemisphere apart.

Understanding seasonal patterns in space and time isn’t just important for evolutionary biology. It is also fundamental to understanding the ecology of animal movement, the consequences of climate change for species and ecosystems, and even the geography of agriculture and other forms of human activity.

Want to know more? You can explore our results in more detail with this interactive online map, which we also include below.

This work was completed under affiliations with the University of California (UC), Berkeley, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Drew Terasaki Hart received funding for this work from UC Berkeley, the UC Berkeley Center for Latin American Studies, the Organization for Tropical Studies, IdeaWild, and the Bezos Earth Fund (via The Nature Conservancy).

– ref. See Earth’s seasons in all their complexity in a new animated map – https://theconversation.com/see-earths-seasons-in-all-their-complexity-in-a-new-animated-map-262935

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Giselle Bastin, Associate Professor of English, Flinders University

“I’ve had Japanese people crying when I tell them I’m not Diana,” British woman Christina Hance, who sometimes earned thousands of pounds a day as a Diana impersonator, told the BBC in 1996. A few months later, she announced she was stepping back from her duties as a Diana lookalike, saying the job had sent her mad and made her ill.

“I ended up a zombie just like her […] the strain of public life has been too much for both of us,” she said. Probably the best known of countless professional Diana impersonators, she “didn’t really look very much like Diana at all”, according to Edward White, whose new book Dianaworld: An Obsession is at least as much about “the princess’s people” as the “People’s Princess”.

In other words, it’s about “the sprawling, ever-evolving precinct of her various lives – public and private, real and imagined” – while mapping how Diana-the-icon has been created by her various “publics”.

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Review: Dianaworld: An Obssession – Edward White (Allen Lane)

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These “publics” sprang from diverse communities: from couturiers to courtiers, hairdressers to politicians, royal servants to sex workers, astrologers to gays, newspapermen to fickle paternal advisors – and soothsayers, superfans and satirists. And, of course, lookalikes.

Dianaworld describes a Diana who was many things to many people. “Dig deep enough”, White suggests, and you’ll find a part of Diana that was Jewish, or American, or a republican – or anything else that she wasn’t but you are.“

First and foremost, though, she was the “pale English rose celebrated for strengthening the Windsor monarchy with the DNA of her indigenous British ancestors”. She was “unencumbered by class identity, snobbery, or elitism of any kind precisely because she was so thoroughly, truly, aristocratic”.

Tony Blair once told an interviewer Diana invented a “new way to be British”. White proposes: “It might be more accurate to say that through Diana, the British invented a new way of fantasizing about themselves.” And:

Never was the domestic adulation of Diana so complete as when she was on the other side of the world. Organs of the British media documented her popularity abroad with an embarrassing neediness.

White charts how the cult of Diana assumed global proportions.

The United States liked to claim Diana as “an American princess” – for “only in America did Diana fully become Diana”, writes White. He argues she personified “the American Dream”, springing as she did from the life of a relative mortal (if one whose “family had been a mighty social presence for half a millennium”) to the superstardom of global celebrity.

Diana often expressed a desire to relocate to the US, thousands of miles away from the strictures of the House of Windsor and arc-lamp intensity of the British tabloid press.

Sound familiar? It seems Prince Harry’s destiny was written for him by his mother.

When visiting Pakistan, India and various African and Middle Eastern countries, Diana was seen as a “post-imperial princess whose image transcended all kinds of social barriers, real and imagined”.

White documents a group of Pakistani women who thrilled to the idea of Diana’s potential marriage to British-Pakistani cardiac surgeon Hasnat Khan, because it showed Diana “was doing what every Asian daughter was meant to do: marrying an Asian doctor”.

Ahead of the Charles and Diana 1986 tour of Japan, thousands of Japanese schoolchildren were gifted Diana robot dolls. Numerous Diana lookalikes and impersonators donned Diana wigs and made appearances at supermarkets.

Across several chapters, White returns to the idea of Diana’s “relationship with Britishness, especially the English component of that identity”. Back in Britain, Diana enjoyed a large following among the nation’s ethnic minority, as well as with the gay community. Her association with the latter was forged by her early embrace of the cause of HIV/AIDS. White writes: “the memory of her has become entwined with a particular idea of gay experience, in which defiance and radical honesty are king and queen.

Acknowledging how Diana was “a woman of mythological complexity and far-reaching significance”, White dissects how so much of the mythologising tends to heap “cliché and trope upon her mythological pyre”.

As the “fairytale princess at the centre of an archetypal romantic fantasy”, Diana was “loaded with other people’s ideas about love for close to half a century”. Dianaworld charts how this “love” spilled over to obsession, in alarming ways.

Sexual obsession

Dianaworld touches on the public’s sexual obsession with the princess, filtered through the male gaze of the media and the royal establishment.

One of the most interesting groups of Diana supporters White identifies are the older, well-connected paternalistic admirers who assumed the mantle of “fatherly advisor”. The likes of Clive James, film producer David Puttnam, and actor and director Richard Attenborough offered her advice on how to perform her royal role and navigate her life post-separation.

One, former British MP Woodrow Wyatt, wrote approvingly in his diary of Diana’s innocent feminine allure, but changed his view after revelations of her extra marital affairs were made in Andrew Morton’s Diana: Her True Story, casting her in a madonna-whore paradigm.

No longer required to revere Diana as the English rose, Wyatt – and many others like him – was now free to despise her and desire her, the nasty twin impulses that had always hovered in the backdrop of the soft-focus princess worship of earlier, more innocent, less honest times.

Lavish and inconstant, tyrannical and needy

Dianaland charts how the cult of “Diana love/obsession” had its parallel in the way Diana conducted her own private relationships.

It seems that she loved others in private in the way that her public loved her – lavishly and inconstantly, stiflingly and adoringly, tyrannically and needily, all or nothing.

With Prince Charles, she passed as an outdoors-loving fan of stalking deer, shooting grouse, fly-fishing and long country hikes. With James Hewitt, she took up riding lessons and clothed her young sons in junior-sized military uniforms. With rugby union player Will Carling, she became a football fan (Carling has denied they had an affair). And with cardiac surgeon Hasnat Kahn, she donned a surgical robe and mask and was filmed watching him perform heart surgery.

When the police interviewed Diana after hundreds of silent phone calls made to art dealer Oliver Hoare’s home were traced to Kensington Palace, another image of Diana emerged: both stalked and stalker.

Influences

Dianaworld is a compendium of existing scholarship about the princess, taking its lead from Michael Billig’s groundbreaking sociological study from the early 1980s, Talking of the Royal Family, and Jude Davies’ 2001 Diana, A Cultural History: Gender, Race, Nation and the People’s Princess

It draws heavily, too, on the biographies of Diana by Sally Bedell Smith (1999), Sarah Bradford (2006) and Tina Brown (2007).

Nonetheless, it distinguishes itself by choosing to take an often amusing, lighthearted approach, more in line with Diana Simmonds’ Squidgie Dearest (1995) and Craig Brown’s Princess Margaret biography, Ma’am Darling (2017).

In this way, it recognises how the worlds of the princess’ people are often absurd and nonsensical, fantastical and comical.

So many Dianas

White describes, for example, one British cinema preview audience’s laughter at the inadvertently hilarious dialogue of one of the early Diana and Charles biopics.

Diana: “I just need you to hold me and touch me”; Charles: “Yes, but you’re always being sick.”

He employs some wry wit to recount how Diana was given an award for Humanitarian of the Year “at a glitzy ceremony in New York at the end of 1995, among a who’s who of selfless lovers of humanity, including Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump”.

One chapter, Dianarama, about the memorialisation of Diana in public art, tells the story of the sculptor John Houlston who, at the end of 1997, had begun a “nine-foot, two-ton work of metal and resin” of Diana, to be placed outside the London headquarters of the National AIDS Trust.

Houlston said that he had been trying to “imbue his rendering of Diana with some of the qualities of Leonardo’s Virgin Mary”, but “the fly in the ointment was that a family of thrushes had taken up residency in Diana’s left ear”.

Houlston had to temporarily abandon the project. The sculpture was never completed.

White weaves some interesting threads between stories of the ways Diana’s various “publics” expressed their devotion to the princess. She gave them, he writes, “an avatar through whom to lead a second life, one that was otherworldly, yet contained something of themselves within it”.

With considerable perspicacity, White concludes,

With her clones and impersonators crowding the streets from Kensington to Kyoto, at times over the last half century it has been difficult to tell where Diana stops and the rest of us begin.

So many Dianas – and Dianaland will by no means be the last on the subject.

Giselle Bastin does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Clones and superfans: 28 years on, our feelings about Diana reflect who we are – https://theconversation.com/clones-and-superfans-28-years-on-our-feelings-about-diana-reflect-who-we-are-262445

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By William Gourlay, Teaching Associate in Politics & International Relations at the School of Social Sciences, Monash University

A Turkish proverb – düştüğün yerden kalk – counsels that one should arise from where one has fallen.

Ekrem İmamoğlu, the jailed mayor of Istanbul and main rival to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey’s 2028 election, has taken this advice to heart.

Imprisoned in March on charges widely viewed to be concocted, İmamoğlu refuses to be silenced. Earlier this month, he published a by-invitation essay in The Economist setting out his vision for Turkey as an open democracy that plays a constructive role on the global stage.

İmamoğlu’s proverbial fall was not mere clumsiness. Members of his opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP) called his arrest a “civilian coup”, pointing the finger at the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) and Erdoğan.

İmamoğlu was also charged with corruption and terror links just days before he was set to be anointed the CHP’s candidate for the 2028 presidential election.

Turks from Istanbul to Anatolia immediately rose up to vent their fury. Protests continued for weeks despite bans on public gatherings. The government has since widened its net to arrest dozens of other opposition figures.

Erdoğan duly accused the opposition of fomenting unrest. But much like uprisings in 2013 that started over a government plan to redevelop an Istanbul park and metastasised into a wider protest movement, these rallies were a spontaneous reaction to Erdoğan’s own policies.

Turkey’s creeping authoritarianism under Erdoğan

Erdoğan was once hailed a reformer who might provide a governance model marrying Islamic observance and democracy that could be replicated throughout the Muslim world.

But after ruling for two decades, first as prime minister and then president, he has centralised power and bent state institutions to his will.

So enmeshed is he in conceptions of the Turkish state and its political and economic architecture, it has spawned new terminology: “Erdoğanism”. Neighbouring states witnessing similar concentrations of power are said to be undergoing “Erdoğanisation”.

Turkey under Erdoğan provides a potent example of “new authoritarianism”, a political model where the leader or ruling party maintains a veneer of democracy while skewing the system to their own advantage. “New authoritarians”, such as Vladimir Putin in Russia and Viktor Orban in Hungary, allow regular elections and grant some space to opposition parties. However, they have also constricted institutions and processes, hobbled the judiciary, the media and civil society, and rendered themselves unassailable.

Documenting the deterioration under Erdoğan, Freedom House rates Turkey’s political freedom at 33 out of 100, ranking it between Pakistan and Jordan. It notes shortcomings in electoral processes, political participation, the functioning of government, freedom of expression and rule of law.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International points to:

• government interference in judicial processes
• unjustified prosecutions and convictions of human rights defenders, journalists and opposition politicians
• restrictions on freedom of assembly
• violence against women.

Despite this, international leaders seem reluctant to admonish Erdoğan for democratic backsliding under his watch. Other than some tepid statements from the European Union, İmamoğlu’s arrest attracted little criticism.

In recent months, US President Donald Trump has described Turkey as a “good place” and praised Erdoğan’s qualities as a leader. The EU has also resumed discussions with Ankara on security issues.

This reflects the increasingly important role Turkey plays on the international stage. It has harboured millions of Syrian refugees and has mediated between Ukraine and Russia to try to end the war there.

As such, Western leaders are reluctant to get Erdoğan offside by raising Turkey’s internal politics.

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Read more:
Inaction from Brussels over the arrest of an opposition leader in Turkey may be a strategic mistake

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Youth movement pushing for change

Yet, like all authoritarians, Erdoğan is most wary of the electorate.

He has long defined his leadership as the personification of milli irade – the “national will”. However, after years of economic downturns and shrinking personal freedoms, fewer Turkish voters are buying it.

Several polls have İmamoğlu well placed to win the next presidential election in 2028, even though his university degree has been revoked (in dubious circumstances), which makes him ineligible to run. Indeed, İmamoğlu has grown even more popular since his arrest.

Such was Erdoğan’s concern that he banned images of Imamoğu, only to see his wife, Dilek, raise her voice to become an opposition figurehead.

In particular, a younger generation of voters, having known nothing but Erdoğan’s rule, is looking for an alternative and turning towards İmamoğlu.

The Turkish journalist and political commentator Ece Temelkuran suggests the energy and new ideas of politically disenfranchised youth are capable of overturning old-school authoritarianism.

Indeed, demonstrations since İmamoğlu’s arrest have seen high turnouts of Gen Z protesters. Even Pikachu made an appearance – a protester dressed in a costume of the video game character fleeing the police in Antalya. And a youth delegate recently raised the issue of İmamoğlu’s imprisonment at the Council of Europe, only to be arrested on returning to Ankara.

And even as Erdoğan has restricted the political playing field in Turkey, İmamoğlu has proven to be a canny and agile operator.

He presents as affable and engaging, both domestically and internationally, in contrast with Erdoğan’s often belligerent posture. He won the Istanbul mayoral race in 2019 on a platform of “radical love”. The approach won hearts and minds in an electorate long defined by polarisation and nationalist rhetoric.

When he was detained in March, İmamoğlu reportedly even quipped to police officers that their work conditions were so poor, they should come and work in his municipality.

Despite Erdoğan’s consolidation of power, democracy may yet have legs in Turkey. Even with İmamoğlu in prison, an energised opposition and younger generation hankering for greater freedoms seem fully intent on arising from where they fall.

William Gourlay is affiliated with the Brotherhood of St Laurence and the Australian International Development Network.

– ref. Polls suggest this man could become Turkey’s next president. Erdoğan is doing everything to stop him – https://theconversation.com/polls-suggest-this-man-could-become-turkeys-next-president-erdogan-is-doing-everything-to-stop-him-263034

Source: The Conversation – Global Perspectives – By Marta Khomyn, Lecturer, Finance and Data Analytics, University of Adelaide

We may already live in the post-truth world, but are we about to enter the era of post-truth statistics?

Each month, the US employment report is one of the most closely watched releases on the health of the world’s largest economy. Financial markets can move sharply depending on the strength of the numbers.

This month, the jobs report was weak. Hours later, US President Donald Trump called the numbers “phony” and fired the head of the agency, Erika McEntarfer.

It was an unprecedented attack on the government’s impartial statistics body, the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is the agency responsible for tracking jobs, wages and inflation – key numbers that tell us how the economy is really doing.

Trump followed that up this week with a further attack on the nation’s economic institutions. He claimed in a social post he had fired one of the governors of the US central bank, the Federal Reserve. The governor, Lisa Cook, said he had no authority to do so.

With Donald Trump’s war on numbers and long-standing institutions, can we even trust US economic data anymore?

Some players in financial markets are already looking at alternative sources of data to get a real-time read on the health of the economy – such as satellite images of the shadows cast by oil tankers.

Chipping away at independence

On the surface, replacing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) with a Trump loyalist might not sound like a big deal. But a BLS commissioner cannot single-handedly falsify the data. The agency is large, full of professional staff, and its data is processed through established systems and checks.

However, the issue goes far beyond firing one official. The Trump administration has taken a series of steps that chip away at the quality and independence of America’s economic data.

After firing McEntarfer, Trump then appointed a loyalist who floated the idea of not releasing the jobs data at all.

The employment report is one of the most closely watched indicators of the US economy, showing how many jobs are being created or lost each month. Without it, millions of Americans would lose a vital tool for understanding whether the economy is growing, slowing, or heading into trouble.

Data is disappearing – literally

Hundreds of US datasets and more than 8,000 government webpages have vanished because the staff maintaining them were fired. These datasets, which taxpayers funded and researchers rely on, are now endangered. In fact, academics have launched the Data Rescue Project to preserve and share this data publicly when the government stops doing so.

Critical economic statistics agencies — the Bureau of Labor Statistics is just one of several — have cut staff. This shrinkage makes their data less precise, because fewer staff means fewer surveys, slower updates, and more reliance on estimates.

But here’s the irony: now the administration is attacking and even firing officials on the grounds that the data is unreliable, when that unreliability is the direct result of their own budget cuts. It’s a political catch-22: gut the agency, then blame it for the very decline in quality that underfunding caused.

The Fed relies on this report to set interest rates

Data is a public good, which means many benefit from it, yet data users are often unable or unwilling to pay for it. This is why data on labour market, inflation or economic growth (gross domestic product) is collected and published by the government, and paid for with taxpayers’ money.

Good quality data enables good policy decisions. For example, the BLS jobs report and inflation numbers are studied carefully by the Federal Reserve to set US interest rates.

The consumer price index (CPI) – a widely watched inflation index – is a benchmark for the US central bank’s mandate to keep inflation at its 2% target. So the quality of the CPI sets the floor for the quality of interest rate decisions.

Financial markets, too, watch government data closely. Both US stock and bond markets, worth trillions of dollars, move sharply on jobs and inflation releases.

Some traders are sourcing their own data

Sophisticated institutional traders such as hedge funds have long profited from having access to higher-quality data.

For example, some hedge funds use satellite images of Walmart parking lots to count the number of cars, which helps predict quarterly sales. This allows them to make money from the insights before Walmart’s sales data becomes public.

Can these alternative data sources also help assess the strength of parts of the economy? A recent academic paper investigates whether private satellite data can be a substitute for official data.

Focusing on two specific measures – US crude oil price, and Chinese manufacturing – the paper finds satellite data is so commonly used by traders that markets no longer react to government data releases, such as weekly surveys of crude oil inventories.

However, there are two caveats. First, not every type of macroeconomic data underpins trillion dollar markets like crude oil, making it profitable for traders to analyse the geometry of shadows cast by floating roofs of oil tankers, estimating quantities of oil stored in these tanks.

Second, this data is only available to a few deep-pocketed investors prepared to pay for it. For most market participants, purchasing satellite-imagery data from companies like Privateer or RS Metrics is prohibitively expensive. This creates inequities in data access and undermines market fairness.

The technological advancements in AI and commercialisation of space make satellite data ubiquitous. But this data is still years away from replacing hand-collected inflation numbers or labour market surveys, which generate public statistics for everyone, not just for those who are prepared to pay.

Marta Khomyn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. In a post-truth world, what happens if we can’t trust US economic data any more? – https://theconversation.com/in-a-post-truth-world-what-happens-if-we-cant-trust-us-economic-data-any-more-263338