Here’s a timely reminder of the folly of those mainstream economists — to a man, maths aficionados who perform all manner of abstruse, but largely meaningless, numerical manipulations with government data that they might try (and usually ignominiously fail) to predict where the price of beans will be tomorrow.
As the London Financial Times reports, not only has the UK’s Office for National Statistics shamefacedly admitted that it has been double counting the size of our pension contributions all these years (meaning we have even more saving to do than we thought, if we are to make up for the losses incurred in the Bubble), and that it has no idea presently how to rectify the mistake, but, it turns out, this also means that it may have been overstating the size of the overall economy ‘for years’ – and that a good £10 billion, around 1% of GDP, will thus prove even more fictitious than much of the seasonally-adjusted, aggregated, price-and-quality altered, imputed rest of it!
