Word: data
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...month of January offered those who track the ups and downs of the U.S. economy 92 significant data releases and announcements to digest. That's according to a calendar compiled by the investment bank UBS. The number doesn't include corporate earnings, data from abroad or informal indicators like, say, cardboard prices (a favorite of Alan Greenspan's back...
...always thus. "One reads with dismay of Presidents Hoover and then Roosevelt designing policies to combat the Great Depression of the 1930s on the basis of such sketchy data as stock price indices, freight car loadings, and incomplete indices of industrial production," writes the University of North Carolina's Richard Froyen in his macroeconomics textbook...
...that was then. The Depression inspired the creation of new measures like gross domestic product. (It was gross national product back in those days, but the basic idea is the same.) Wartime planning needs and advances in statistical techniques led to another big round of data improvements in the 1940s. And in recent decades, private firms and associations aiming to serve the investment community have added lots of reports and indexes of their own. (See the best business deals...
Taken as a whole, this profusion of data surely has increased our understanding of the economy and its ebb and flow. It doesn't seem to have made us any better at predicting the future, though; perhaps that would be too much to ask. But what is troubling at a time like this, with the economy on everyone's mind, is how misleading many economic indicators can be about the present...
...mostly statistical noise. Those who read great meaning into either were deceiving themselves. It's a classic case of information overload making it harder to see the trends and patterns that matter. In other words, we might be better off paying less (or at least less frequent) attention to data. (See the worst business deals...