``Your confidence in the reliability of official numbers is inspiring, Doug. But I persist in believing that the glowing federal data regarding US economic health in recent years owe much to the principle of Garbage In, Garbage Out. See Gretchen Morgenson's column in the NY Times today, Scandal's Ripple Effect: Earnings Under Threat, e.g.:
`All of these mechanisms that were designed to present a company's financial condition in the best possible light are now going to meet a very much higher standard of review and disclosure,...' '' Carl Remick
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Let's not forget the question of what these companies produce and what that so-called product is. For example, Enron or HMO's or any of a dozen other sorts of businesses produce exactly nothing and sell it at hugely inflated prices---after all just about anything added to nothing, is greatly enhanced by its juxtaposition to the void. While these artificially designed or rather governmentally created niches of of neoliberal economic activity might be given even accurate numbers, these hardly reflect any concept of what I would consider economic health.
I am sure it is very old fashioned to try to equate infrastructure and social health with economic health, but that is what I would like to see done.
For example, I am surrounded by all the accouterments of the just crashed economic boom of the 90s: a newly re-vitalized industrial municipality, vast increases in office space, arty lofts in former factories, SUV's on every street, lots of well dressed youngish adults buzzing around importantly on cell phones, jammed freeways, crowded quick-food-trendy snack joints, etc. However, all this economic activity (in Emeryville) is accompanied by a completely crashed public school district that is currently managed by the state auditor, since it's bankrupt. The side streets and most of the sidewalks in the neighborhoods are broken up with huge holes, the housing that hasn't been yuppified, is crumbling, most of the people live marginally at or below working poverty levels, and so forth. Needless to say most of the locals are working class black or poor white/chicano/asian, and most of the yuppies are white middle or upper middle class and from somewhere else.
In other words, the two class society has its physical expression here in stark contour. All of the so-called economic re-vitalization of the 90s, has gone straight to the already well off, and very, very little has trickled down to the rest. And what's more that economic development has all been devoted to what I consider basically worthless activity: dotcom-computer bullshit, so-called bio-tech, and endless commercial services, etc. In other words it doesn't take heavy equipment to move whatever these outfits claim to produce in the new economy. And yet this location was created specifically to be a manufacturing and distribution center, dominated by heavy equipment. It is surrounded by rail lines, shipping port, and truck depots (most of which are crumbling just like the old local stores, schools, streets, houses and apartments). All the people who used to work in these manufacturing and distribution industries are still here, except now they are poorer, older, and completely by-passed.
Whatever the official numbers, and whatever they claim to represent has also been neatly separated from the material base of what has physically occurred in concrete reality. So, because of this separation from empirical reality, it doesn't matter whether these numbers are cooked or not.
After all, what is the difference between a cooked artificial measure of value and a corrected artificial measure of value? If the underlying conception of value has been completely separated from any common sense material equivalent, then the construct itself is meaningless.
I agree that garbage in, garbage out.
Chuck Grimes