So, that answers this Telegraph piece:
Can we really trust Britain’s economic data?
So, what time’s the footie then?
Ah, you’d like a little more would you?
Yes, the things said are true, an economy is a big complicated thing, difficult to measure, best possible is being done and so on. But we find an extra 2% of GDP down the back of the sofa - from which we can conclude that detailed Keynesian demand management is a very silly idea.
But there’s a much, much, larger problem here. We have endless whingeing about child poverty levels - which are something we don’t even measure. For poverty is now defined as less than 60% of median household income. So we’re measuring inequality of household income, not poverty at all. Beyond that even in these days of late blooming fertility those with children are going to be younger than those who have had them - and household income does tend to rise with age. You know, career progression, all that stuff.
Our measure of wealth deliberately excludes everything the government does about wealth. Currently everyone else pays £6k a year in taxes so your kids can fail their GCSEs. That’s wealth you’ve got which isn’t included in any analysis either of total wealth or wealth distribution. Similarly the NHS. OK, it’s health care that’s indifferent at best and yet purely by being alive in this place at this time you’ve a lifetime supply of it. Something not included in our wealth statistics. They don’t even include the state pension in the pensions wealth statistics. Let alone the wider benefits system which can indeed be modelled like an insurance policy and so have a capital value.
And that’s before we get to consumer wealth. Everyone’s a supercomputer in their pocket, WhatsApp makes international phone calls free to everyone - the Duke of Westminster and the most recent asylum seeker together.
The economic data we’ve got simply is not fit - as with that Keynesian demand management idea - for the purposes people try to use it for. We certainly can’t trust it because it’s measuring the wrong things for any useful purpose.
Measuring the wrongs things and badly - no, that’s not the evidence base upon which to run a polity.