Have you noticed that the administration has set up the standards for evaluating their success sot hat they simply can't lose?

Let's look at "jobs saved or created". Now, I am sure some people out there think there is some way to measure "jobs saved", but there isn't. Oh, I suppose they could create estimates for a future month, say July, and then, after the month ends, see how many jobs were lost and say the difference was "jobs saved", but as the incentive would be to heavily overestimate future job losses so as to have a higher "jobs saved" number. In truth there is simply no way to know how many jobs were saved. And administrations didn't try.(Or lacked the audacity to try to claim they had "saved jobs" while the job market shrank.)

Of course the reality is no one thinks they are really saving jobs, they just want to avoid blame for a shrinking labor market.

Or the bailout. We continue to hear how the bailout "wasn't big enough", but is there any evidence it did any good at all? Well, economists claim there is. I ran across an article in the WSJ claiming every $5 in food stamps stimulated $9 in spending.(see "The WSJ Should Know Better") How could they tell? Well, they estimated, of course. Once again, economic guesswork is treated as if it were proof.

And that is the truth of almost all of these economic forecasts, estimates, and other "models", they are code for "guesswork". I am as big a fan of economics as anyone, at one time I was admitted to a doctoral program to study it, so I have no bone to pick with economics or economists. But when it comes to "quantitative economics" I have to say the public perception, that it is a science, is just wrong. Most forms of macroeconomic calculation are little better than guesswork, and even when there are some sort of numbers to compare,t he fact that they are both aggregate figures, and use variable value dollars as their unit, make them unreliable in the extreme. Nor is that the only problem. Every calculation hides a host of assumptions. For example, when "job creation" figures assume any jobs, or even a certain percentage, of new jobs are "due to" government spending. The reality is we can't know that, and as the real world does not provide controls, there is no way to test the assumption either. So we have to simply take it on faith.

But none of that stops the present administration. With a straight face they present all manner of rosy numbers about increased activity, jobs saved and created, and all other sorts of positive news, even while the numbers turn ever more dire.

In one way, you have to admire them, the audacity of claiming success while the economy plunges into an ever deepening hole. On the other hand you can't help but feel a bit insulted thinking that they expect us to be so dimwitted we actually believe what they are trying to feed us.

POSTSCRIPT

For a discussion of why such calculations are deceptive, if not meaningless, read my posts "Mathematical Deception", "The Rubber Yardstick", "Inflation and Uncertainty", "Why Do People Consider George Will Bright?", "The Limits of Econometrics", "The Limits of Technocracy", "Chaos Theory and Athropogenic Global Warming" (for an analogous situation in another field of study), "Knowing Our Limits" and "The Limits of "Scientific" Management". Some of this is discussed in my post "Greed Versus Evil", though that is a rather lengthy post, most of which is not precisely relevant.

POSTSCRIPT II

For those who doubt my claim that such calculations are based on mere speculation, let me offer this example. After tax cuts, every state int he union shows an increase in employment, ranging from 2% to 5%. However, local factors exist to both increase or decrease employment, all separate from tax cuts. On the other hand, there are also factors which are influenced, to some degree, by tax cuts. So, let us say in Kansas you find some new employment was due to a government contractor expanding his factory. Is that due to tax cuts or spending? How can you tell? Perhaps he would have not expanded, even with the new contract, but for he tax cuts. But maybe not. Ascribing those jobs either way is simple guesswork.

In fact, any figures at all are guesses. There is simply no way to know what employment "would have been" if the tax cut had not happened. As the tax cut is a historical fact, we can't tell what would have happened without it. Asking so is as pointless as those silly "what if" questions college history students sometimes ask, such as "what if Bismarck had not existed? What would have happened to Europe?" There is simply no way to know. Any answer is just a guess. And the same for asking what the effect of various policies was, at least when you try to apply concrete numbers. (I can say theoretically tax cuts would increase employment, but beyond that, asking for how many and where, is to enter the realm of fiction.)

Unfortunately, int he case of economics, these absurd "what if" speculations often serve as the basis for the spending of billions of dollars.