Do We Have Any Idea About What’s Going On?

When I was growing up (this was the 1960’s) I assumed that if you read The New York Times every morning and watched Walter Cronkite at night, you knew what was going on. My belief in the sanctity and honesty of the news was first called into question when it turned out that the attack on the Destroyer Maddox in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1964 didn’t actually happen. But this misreporting wasn’t the fault of the news media because nobody in those days imagined that a President could get up in front of the American people and just lie.

We were all very innocent in those days, by the way. That was then, this is now.

Now we assume that everything the government tells us is a lie. Or at least it probably or maybe isn’t true.

Except the problem is that the government isn’t doing the lying unless you want to believe that every, single number that the government generates to measure how we live our lives are numbers that are concocted out of what Grandpa used to call ‘bupkis’ (read: nonsense.)

Ever hear of an organization called the OECD? It’s a Paris-based group of 38 countries — Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development whose members publish and share socio-economic data which they claim to be accurate and true, so that we can have a better and more comprehensive understanding of how the world’s economy changes over time.

A country can’t join the OECD unless it collects and publishes relevant data on a regular basis. So, for example…