Source: Liberal Currents
by Maia Mindel
“Statistical forgery is usually associated with autocratic and illiberal governments, as well as economically unsuccessful and extremely corrupt administrations. For instance, less democratic countries are more likely to fudge their official statistics. Comparing GDP growth to night-time electricity usage (which is highly correlated to GDP), researchers find that non-democracies tend to overstate economic growth by approximately 35%. … American statistics, it should be noted, may have flaws of various kinds, but are generally accurate: the Billion Prices Project, tracking the online price of a billion goods in 2015 and 2016, resulted in remarkably similar readings to the official CPI. So with a good starting point, and since autocracy, economic failure, and corruption are all on the menu for the Trump and Musk duumvirate, it’s worth taking a close look at how they could pull it off.” (02/25/25)
https://www.liberalcurrents.com/can-we-trust-government-statistics-under-trump/