On Friday all the researchers in the new Economic Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCoE) met at its home in the National Institute to catch up on the range of projects and it was terrific to hear about the progress and challenges across the entire span of the research programme.
One of the projects is concerned with measuring uncertainty in economic statistics and communicating that uncertainty. The discussion sent me back to Oskar Morgenstern’s 1950 On the Accuracy of Economic Observations (I have the 2nd, 1963, edition). It’s a brilliant book, too little remembered. Morgenstern is somewhat pessimistic about both how meaningful economic statistics can be and whether people will ever get their heads around the inherent uncertainty.
“The indisputable fact that our final gross national product or national income data cannot possibly be free of error raises the question whether the computation of growth rates has any value whatsoever,” he writes, after showing that even small errors in levels data imply big margins of error in growth rates.
On the communications front, he noted that members of the public were often suspicious of economic statistics – and rightly so: “The professional users of economic and social statistics strangely enough often seem to be less skeptical than the public.” Yet, he added, public trust was essential both to deliver the appropriations of funding for statistical agencies and so that people had the confidence to provide information to statisticians.
I do find it odd that many economists download the productivity data from standard online sources uncritically and pronounce on the ‘puzzle’ of its zero growth when so many providers of raw data point (businesses in this case) out that from their perspective there are significant productivity gains. But that’s what the ESCoE is about – trying to resolve a different puzzle, that of two contradictory sets of evidence – and it’s keeping me gainfully occupied.
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