All we ever do with the world is measure it. Discuss. Technology makes us good at generating and tabulating data, so we express everything in terms of the data it generates - which means numbers. But data never really accounts for anything (I think that might be a pun - intended if so).
In Friday's FT, there was a piece about July's economic data. It's ambiguous, and in some respects (retail spending in particular) surprisingly good. The forecast post-Brexit (sorry) apocalypse has not happened. But, said the various authorities quoted, this is not conclusively good news; we're not out of the woods yet; the crash may still be imminent. Reading all that, I was reminded of all those weapons of Mass Destruction hidden in the Iraqi desert - or rather, of all the assurances that we'd find them. Okay, so there's no trace of them in the actual sand, no evidence that they're there, but we'll definitely find them, just you wait. The data says there hasn't been a crash, but just you wait...
It was something about the tone of voice. Not exactly hopeful, but. Stubborn, almost. The real world isn't conforming to expectation. The real world should get in line.
There was a follow-up piece in the Weekend FT going deeper into the data, and a leader suggesting that policy-makers should be cautious about drawing any conclusions from July. Yeah, okay. I'm sitting here thinking about belief versus fact; what should happen versus what's actually going on; the failure of real events to match the elegance of the economic models on which they're based.
In Friday's FT, there was a piece about July's economic data. It's ambiguous, and in some respects (retail spending in particular) surprisingly good. The forecast post-Brexit (sorry) apocalypse has not happened. But, said the various authorities quoted, this is not conclusively good news; we're not out of the woods yet; the crash may still be imminent. Reading all that, I was reminded of all those weapons of Mass Destruction hidden in the Iraqi desert - or rather, of all the assurances that we'd find them. Okay, so there's no trace of them in the actual sand, no evidence that they're there, but we'll definitely find them, just you wait. The data says there hasn't been a crash, but just you wait...
It was something about the tone of voice. Not exactly hopeful, but. Stubborn, almost. The real world isn't conforming to expectation. The real world should get in line.
There was a follow-up piece in the Weekend FT going deeper into the data, and a leader suggesting that policy-makers should be cautious about drawing any conclusions from July. Yeah, okay. I'm sitting here thinking about belief versus fact; what should happen versus what's actually going on; the failure of real events to match the elegance of the economic models on which they're based.