Faced with a slide into public economic madness, I have taken up the analysis of collective irrationality as a form of therapy. Herewith I offer a convenient summary of the new and improved Orwellian methods America’s Ministry of Truth applies to economic statistics under the Obama Administration:
1. Cherry picking. If you have three negative numbers on employment and one slightly positive one, you tout the positive one and ignore the negatives.
2. Making data out of noise. Since the self-deluded citizenry doesn’t apply the concept of statistical margin of error, any positive fractional improvement, like a .3% improvement in consumer confidence or unemployment numbers can be represented as a “turnaround” or an occasion for celebration.
3. Quiet negative “revisions.” Almost every month, the government employment statistics are revised in a manner that makes them less positive. This is not a coincidence.
4. Promotion of amnesia. Important and highly-touted programs, like PPIP, are made to “disappear” from public consciousness when they fail.
5. Moving goalposts. Can’t control an exploding deficit? Just set your goal to reduce it by “half” at a date that constantly moves into the future. Don’t want to mark bad assets to market? Mark them to whatever “model” makes them look good.
6. Magic hats. Need to come up with a few hundred thousand jobs every month to take the sting off depression-level job losses? Just cook up an unverifiable jobs generator, like the BLS “birth/death” model that hallucinates jobs out of invisible new businesses. Hey presto! Unemployment is down again.
What upsets me most about all this shoddy behavior is that it is tolerated and encouraged after it has been repeatedly and thoroughly documented by journalists, economists, academics, and bloggers. Any informed citizen knows about the deceptions of our Ministry of Truth, and any curious citizen could learn about them in 30 minutes of Google searching. For the serious investor, $175 a year is the cost of unfalsified economic data from www.shadowstats.com. But the public much prefers the MOT product: cheerful lies.
Let us be very clear about this. Handsome, intelligent, and earnest President Barak Obama presides over an administration that knowingly prepares and distributes false information about the US economy in order to provide political and financial advantages to the people who put him in power. A nation of liars has placed the most attractive and persuasive available liar in charge of its government.