The Depression is over
by CarolineThis week’s New Yorker Financial Page examines the financial information gap and how it’s closing over time: Only in fairly recent decades have statistics like the GDP made it possible to quantify unemployment and consumer spending in close-to-real time. And how was it before?
In June of 1930, relying on some anecdotal evidence of an upturn, Herbert Hoover announced, “The Depression is over.” And in his State of the Union address that December he said that two and a half million Americans were unemployed. But, as Hoover acknowledged, that number was eight months old. At the time of the speech, five million people were out of work, and a hundred thousand more were losing their jobs every week.
Eight months old!! The timeframe now is about a month and even that seems rough when we’re making decisions about how to turn over a capsizing economy.
The rest of the article details a new measure called the Billion Prices Project, where computers gather price data from online retailers and process it more quickly than humans alone ever could. It’s not perfect but it’s another facet to consider, and it circumvents some of the flaws of traditional financial data-gathering.
no responses