Source: EconLog
by David Hebert
“‘“Expert failure’ is clearly having a moment. Pollsters, Wall Street analysts, tech futurists … all are facing demands to reckon with getting it wrong. Economics, though, seems to be getting special attention. Lately, this has metastasized into Orweillian skepticism of government data itself. It’s one thing to argue that economists have misread numbers. It’s quite another to claim that the numbers themselves are lies. Believe me, I understand the reflex. If it’s true that the government fails at so many things it sets out to do, why trust its statistics? But this cynicism commits a category error: confusing the government’s inability to solve economic problems with its capacity to solve technical problems.” (10/31/25)
https://www.econlib.org/econlog/trust-government-statistics-not-government/