Some folks – perhaps only stats nerds like yours truly – noticed this item in the press last week: “Second-Quarter G.D.P. Revised Sharply Higher … Government statisticians gave the American economy a lift Thursday when they sharply revised their calculation of the nation’s second-quarter growth to an annual rate of 2.5 percent, up from an initial estimate of 1.7 percent.”
What is striking about this huge revision – the new estimate means that the economy was growing almost 50% faster than initially estimated – is not so much the statistical work itself, but how the media, the financial markets, and public read them. [cont.]
Claude Fischer, UC Berkeley