strange fruit amounts to an acceptance of a very specific representation of this violence. after all, these gruesome images were created and preserved because they fell in line with discourses that supported racial violence. the black corpses surrounded by a mob of no grieving loved ones in night. best mainstream lynching photography depicted extensis i fully approve no connection to the family or community or to institutions like marriage. to similar effect, damage is to encourage an acknowledgment of black oddities and even bought ugly pain. the interest in that not naturally led to an appreciation of the communities mourn. losses, including psychological, emotional and financial suffering. too often, his torrents have interpreted the photographs according to the team that

produced them. sure, scholars worked to expose the racist orientation, but we've been slow to undermine by replacing the perspective of victimized communities on par with the photographs. today i do that. using slack off or drawings come african-americans who lifted the head mob violence and its photographic represent tatian left artifacts that offer insight into causes and can't quinces of mob violence that are not available through this photographs. >> first thing i do is not led the largest cable tv company by the second largest cable tv company. that is where i'd start. my job here on the judiciary committee is to add these

hearing this to raise my concerns. mr. cohen seems like i really culex really smart gray. i can say about him he earned sort of what he did. but my job was to ask some tough questions. you see, they have 107 lobbyist on top of a hill. they are swarming cap mozilla. i got 100,000 more than 100,000 people with objections. first thing i do is stop this deal. i would not let this go through. >> senator franken weighs in on the proposed comcast time warner

cable merger on monday in "the communicators" at 8:00 p.m. eastern c-span2. >> up next, "after words" with guest host subfloor of "the wall street journal." this week zachary karabell in his book, 73 -- 73 b. economic impact varies. he argues are not so in today's and they were created. the program is about an hour. >> zachary karabell, you have written a fascinating book all about how we live in a world defined by economic indicators and how just a handful of them coming gdp, inflation have come to define us as the nation, even make a very good case they are

very flawed and have been to a certain degree. how do we get to this point. 1066 and there's a fascination with trying to measure where we stand in the road. >> guest: at least a reply wrote a book about numbers. i'm not even a trained academic economist. so i was interested in this question how to live in a world with his numbers are so woven into a conversation about howard doing as a nation. any nation. not just we as americans. so the question of what is this always the case? now, wasn't always the case. only recently given how central they were. the question was when these countries -- many people want to figure out what was going on

economic really with numbers. i do start the book with 1066. the conqueror, commissions to sergey v. output of this round. you probably could've gone back to the romans. any empire basically wants to know how much land is under control and how much frightening output with the owner of service attacks ravenous agriculture. whose farming land, with the exception of not including the church. >> is previously big enough yearbook. go around and around and how much corn or whatever is being grown. even none, what it kind of shows

in space communist statistics and statistics is the art of stamping a lot of stuff you count without having to count all individually. they didn't know that in 1066. they just try to go around and cut everything. >> at what you about. the birth of statistic. you point out there's another big leap forward in terms of the tent being to counter the empires and trade. there does reach this point and tell us that is between accounting and to test six. both aspects of human reality art difficult to count and the first thing people realize when

you try to count average lifespan, particularly at a at a time when a lot of people didn't make it past five, six, seven years old. if you were to count all and the vitality of come your average less than what he unfortunately extraordinarily low. i was when it first suffers to get a snapshot in numbers of what going on the hunt to make choices about what to leave out. and then there's a whole series of mathematical formula about how to do that artfully, which develop in the same suit or create a tactlessness in german and french growth of creating statistics. there's a whole number of people that if you're a statistician you kind of remember it great mind in the way we look at newton in terms of calculus and gravity. but there isn't really one person. this is just a rolling series of

not magical convolutions. he really takes until the 19th century before you start getting kind of the economic statistics that we think of now. >> host: this book is that it's usually focused on the united case. he made the case that again this question of counting was ever present even in the beginning of the united states and very much in the founders. it makes its way into the constitution. >> most people don't remember when we talk about slavery, north, south, as most dates, weak states. we don't usually talk about the census is embedded in the constitution at every 10 years as an account of the population. go have representational democracy has to know how many people here representing them decide how many representatives in the house of representatives, which is one part the population is going to represent. to how many people there are and

where to the human curiosity to not been to measure. what are these people doing? was their employment? how many hours they spend working? was the nature of their home life terms without play. he became this creeping growth of information that people's lives economically, even though it he began this creeping growth of information that people's lives economically, even though it he began this creeping growth of information that people's lives economically, even though it a the 19th century, the early 20th century where it began to see the arrival of the 19th century, the early 20th century were began to see the arrival of these modern indicators that now have come to define us so much. i think most people would be astounded by most things in this book because the his dreams all really interesting. i think people would be surprised to find out the birth of a lot of these economic indicators was driven in a huge part of the kind of worries and political concert or seek him in the cause of social justice that came along with the industrial

revolution, labor unions. people were and how much people were and how hard they worked and how much are they keeping and you have the great story about opera stewart. tell us about that. >> if you ask many people about something called unemployment, it would've been a meaningless question because when you had early agrarian world where everyone needed to work to live, dhea you could be unemployed or without work was inconceivable, particularly because until the population at those in the late 19th century there's always more things than he doing invent our bodies capable of doing. if you're not working you have no moral character or. somehow. you have worked it needed doing. it took the industrial revolution and the transfer of workforces from the farms in the factories to create this thing called job. we are painting with broad strokes. i'm sure someone can find exceptions to the rules.

one of the things that drives the question of the nature of people having a job, they could pay for that job adequately relative to their needs is the series of progressive reforms in the late 19 century the ball this kind of industrial revolution as a chaotic and dislocating one in the united states. one of the people who is drawn to basically because of social social justice is this guy named russell stewart was training and instead been appointed to the illinois commission of labor and then makes its way to washington where he joins what was then very sleepy, not very well funded only with the creative paper statistics. i think of him as a little bit of this is dishing that mark twain. ornery, suffered not at all and

was kind of them going to call a spade a spade and find the numbers to measure it kind of guy. he was one of these sort of driving force is that we need a snapshot of employment patterns to prevent it dismissed from taking it out. >> host: he's also a man in the right time because you have this comp on other factors in particular, 1929 and 21, we have this recession that three people for a loop. politicians say and how come you to measure how bad it is simply don't know where we started from. and of course you have the great depression. this seems to push you very much this desire to understand just what we are losing. >> guest: a few things in this. people like irving fisher was a yale professor whose interest did in thinking about prices in what we now call inflation. but there has been some work done before the great depression

on what's going on in this thing we now call the economy. nobody used the word economy until the early 20th century. the only reason i say with any confidences if you something called google ideogram, everything printed him a digitized come you can play around and find the frequent the with which these were used. if you type in the economy until the 1930th flatline with almost no mention. he keeps accelerating. until we create numbers like the unemployment rate, like gdp, inflation, there is no the economy. this political economy, but there's nothing called the economy because there's no means to measure and capture it. it great depression in this massive dislocation. we do know is the great depression in 1929. all they knew was some bad things happening which seems somewhat worse. there's always been bad cycles.

hoover had been an apostle. i was his calling card to become president was he was more than confident administrator during the war. he was a minor executive and he believed in scientific management and science demands facts. 1929 and some of the movements have been in place to find the takes to create and unemployment number. that is the first time in american history or any other country's history with this notion of unemployment number become central to our body politics. >> now is that -- coming up with an unemployment involved in making lots and lots and lots of judgment. the first series had to sit down and say we are going to count this. this is our definition. how could that the rate

complexities of designing that? castaways would need to be unemployed quicksort seeming to need to bachao next number of hours a week what number of hours visiting or working? the late 19th and 20th century, people work 70 hours a week. how many hours you work to have a job? do you trust people self identification? do you have a job? are you going to tell the truth? or the surveyors are going to send around going to ask enough people because you're not going to survey the entire population of the country and ask every single person do you have a job, to have a job? you ask a subset of those people. how do you do that quite you do a geographically? are you going to overstate how much unemployment areas in rural areas? how do you decide? is by population, demographics kaminsky? and know where they they worked

out initially immediately. [inaudible] >> a definition of what does it mean to be unemployed has changed over time and that it not not having a child to use a double negative. to be unemployed statistically doesn't mean you're not working. it means you wish to have a full-time job. you have at least told the people asking you do you really can actively for a full-time job for you. time before he got us the question question now for weeks, earlier this day. and you're there for unemployed because you're looking to kick your work. it's not that you just don't have worked. we use a term much more loosely today because we use it as a thumbs-up, thumbs down. even getting to the point of defining it was immensely complicated. >> submit the final final decision? >> assist decision-making by lots of different voices and

people arguing. solitaire is one person a says this is the rate. think of is doing its homework although the reason you should focus on the united states is a lot of creation of the numbers comes from the united states and then goes global. i like multiple societies regina simultaneously. the desire to command, no, understand economically stems at least in our history from an american initiative and some british initiatives that goes global. >> host: alongside the unemployment rate, we also have the creation of the precursors of that. this is happening at the same time. again, point out the part of this was about meeting to assess their recession and understanding what it was now versus going forward. you also point out when you get a whole new aspect what is happening at this time is that you are also treated the concept of government as an economic

actor. >> host: this again hunted them a alien other than in times of war because they cerda force everything to focus on war production and supplying armies. one thing you had in the 1930s who says we know this huge effort of government spending in the form of a new deal and the united states, the labour government of great britain is doing its own form of it. one of the things in the u.s. is the understandable desire there was a administration to say to critics that we've done all this completely unprecedented step and spent all this money. is it doing any good? is making things better? unless you can measure the economy and its output in chile south of the, we spent a lot of money and its output is why and why stick to the next, it's an ideological argument, which is what it had been until then.

there've been people trying to measure the output of a country and this has been happenstance and academic. they have their seats before they become. >> it's really in the 17th century as for the same time the statistics pitt then there is a role, at first, rich men who think this would be fun. they seem to do experiments that graduate they be fun to measure the output of the country. i'm at least least until the early 20th centuries. in the u.s., there's a russian émigre named diane cousineau who later went about price. we know about john maynard keynes in britain and people like sir richard stone has another evidence of this. they start saying how we measure output? defining mac, big definition

list you include domestic work? one of the things fomented was cooked, cleaned, and make sure the homeless taking care of. >> i can type my domestic work were included, pdp would double. just i would cope immensely. we have solutions include this. this is an essential aspect of economic committee that's productive in the absence of which is structured. some of the sa market price, were not going to include it. gdp is simply what is the market output? things that has a price and the cost. the reset domestic work is the target figure out what the cost of that was. >> host: but this is more, you point out this is the focus of the administration and say we put this much money in analysis

of the benefit. it was also via twiki via some highly predictive value and the fury teensiest ashcan fan, you believe you've got to stimulate demand in order to know how much, you actually have to know where things stand. >> guest: you get those things in our current discussion of how much output do you need to stimulate? how much demand? what is the gap between what we are doing and what we think the right level is? we think about that in terms of employment. if there's 6.5% unemployment, from mars there's no reason to know. this is not about whether or not people are finding jobs because we had the sense of what the system ought to be doing numeric we based on what it did do numerically. this is all kind of made up as it goes along. it allows the roosevelt administration to talk about

national income than they look our national income. if were going to be the armory of the world, how much domestic industry, cars and tractors to be sifted to producing guns without sowing fear booing economic life in order to do that come you have to understand how much are reproducing, how much can we produce, how much more can we produce about generating scarcity and therefore inflation which is the bugaboo of societies in war. they explain how it was. have these people believed it to be one of the most essential component to war affair with the domestic economy, and won war without reviving your economic most countries take years to rebuild internally.

>> host: you connect to the point talking about the creation of economies and how they allow the creation of the economy. what you're also describing here and you do it through on the book is the fundamental shift that the government had the ability much in the way that mirrored the industrial revolution to manage the economy. you could actually look at these numbers and say okay now are going to have this much here and everything will still be okay in the yen. this is a new concept. >> guest: trying to figure out how much more revenue you create. that was the sole challenge thinking of dynasties and kingdoms. the itu have this thing called economic policy recalibrate and try to lend economic side, the ups and downs that were part and parcel for one reason or another is all part of the scientific revolution and the emergence of socialist governments. it is one reason why even today

there is an insurer will continue to be a deep-seated suspicion in every society that all these numbers, gdp, inflation, unemployment financial numbers to reflect variants of people. they race for government to exert control. i don't point that in the book and that's all another question and subject. but it's definitely one that underlies all of this discussion. to listen to the numbers and go combine. inflation has been telling me how much it cost for me to live. the way for government to prevent my cost of living allowance going up or something like that. >> host: i do want to talk about conspiracy theories because it's a fascinating aspect. you touch on something basically post-world war ii. you describe how we enter into this explosion a sort of fascination with economic indicators. the growth of yet no one in private players start to get

involved and we can talk about a few of those. one of the innovation cycle when the area of economic indicator to me how this guy named george katona who starts to measure, and this gets your point, but the people to measure consumer sentiment in these that. >> guest: you have this effervescent of numbers. you had some before the housing associations and some purchasing managers and people accompanies it by festering figure out what is going on nationally. many good associations that governments crating statistics, so will create statistics. many of academics who think what are we going to read to this? there was this quirky guy who another anagram came in the 1930s to train both as an economist and if they just

thought psychologists. if anyone remembers the 1970s, without going into that condition, his belief was how people think and feel individually shaped their behavior economically and therefore if you can get a gauge of how people feel communicate a gauge of how they're about to act. it is interesting for the government during world war ii because they're so is in an aspect inflation in prices based only on what people perceive. if you think things are going to get cheaper, if you think there's inflation you'll spend a lot now. there is behavior that goes with that expectation. they want to cage and make inflation expectations are being kept. they develop a six surveys. you feel good or bad about the economy? good or bad about personal finances? better in six months or worse in six months? to tickle the questions in surveys and then you create an

index. and then you create a number called super sentiment which we live documents from multiple sources. through organizations like the university of michigan, conference board, abc news for a while had a survey. it all begins from this assault ecologist economists. the one that has only been clear since then, and most interesting like what two people feel if its predictive power is absolute zero. his pushback was you can't test whether or not this works by asking a family six months later whether or not they did what they said expense before. it's not about individual behavior been predicted. it's about patterns. if enough people say they're not feeling good, that might be a leading indicator. >> host: this nonetheless remains an important aspect. >> guest: we've come to be in a culture where we like numbers to sort of describe reality. >> host: this is the point of

this chapter is to talk about in the 40 surfeit views on the six he is you don't just have this huge spiraling of numbers, that you have the media really focusing on these. business communities really focused in on the same come to be interwoven in america's ideas of how we are, how are we performing vis-à-vis everybody else. correct? >> guest: part of this is presented as "time" magazine fortune and "businessweek" phenomenon. he said they have these outlets that talk about economic life. we are to the point you to think about the nature of the cold war and the degree to which the cold war because it was the cold war we were not fighting the soviet union and it was perceived legitimately asked the context of economic systems. loss of production. it is doing better at who's making my staff, whose staff is better, whose output is greater.

they had their own soviet project here we had our gross national product. there's a really famous debate between nixon and khrushchev when nixon was vice president. this kind of arguing about appliances and whose staff is better? is making more of it? and nuclear weapons on one hand and then you had industrial output at the other. and then you had all these nations in the road to colonizing, becoming the country's road by france or great britain or portugal and when he joined the u.n., you have to start measuring this thing called your economy. if you're a new nation want economic aid from the world bank or the international monetary fund, create serious effect to show the money had a good effect. just at the gnp was created for the new deal, for us to vote to show the funding research into the 1950s and 1960s appear in a new african country region

country and you want economic aid come you have to show a temperature economic life half of it is about economic rice, half of it's about economic, is the economic security council in u.n. most of us unless you look at

our ignorant. we know by the security council because it was front and center in the cold war about states and problems that half of the work of you and, more was about economic develop an exact in the belief that when the economic insecurity, when you things like the great depression, an then tt would then lead to things like world war ii. and maybe a wrong thesis. we don't get to replay the tape but it was clear the the animating pieces and it led to just like those of proliferation of nuclear weapons in the cold weather to proliferation of economic numbers whereby the entire world becomes indicators. we all know measure our lives with this dashboard of numbers in a way that before the 1950s absolutely no one did. >> host: one last thing you talked about in terms of what inspired this huge growth is there is money in producing these things. a lot of things are produced by private organizations. you mentioned george katona in his work at the mercy of michigan which i believe has made a fair amount of dollars off of producing some of these

and then wall street starts paying for them. that's a big factor. that's the 1970s and 1980s when people started wanting a trading edge any start trading on the numbers in the believe the numbers within represent something fundamental and you can have economic activity which would've influence over corporate earnings. the numbers business becomes a huge one, the national association of home builders are putting out it's a set of numbers. the institute of supply management starts putting out its numbers and that manufacturing activity. the federal reserve starts getting into the act and starts doing surveys. he how this proliferation. in the way that was just sort of inconceivable. one thing i try to be clear about in the book is that just like we all individual have a point of fortune, we are born in a certain time, shaped by the culture we grew up in, all these numbers are born within a few

decades of each other fundamentally. they are a product of that time. they are a product of the '30s, \40{l1}s{l0}\'40{l1}s{l0} and 50s mostly. in that respect they were designed at that moment to measure that world. they do a pretty good job measuring the world of industrial nations states that makes them but we don't live in that world anymore. i know we're not segueing but the reason to look at that history is to try to understand who invented these numbers at what moment in time and is the world where now living in the same as that world? >> host: let's talk a little bit about all the problems with the fact that we now have arrived in this period of time in a world where we define ourselves. one of the things which you just mentioned and you make a very strong case in the book is these numbers are by large wholly inadequate for the purposes for which they are used. one of the descriptions i just loved is talk about the iphone

and the way we measure for instance, the trade deficit. talk about how white might've worked at one point and why does it work anyway now. >> guest: to be very clear, i do think a lot of these are inadequate. i do think though i kind of honor at the degree to which they were not adequate but they were important when they were invented. they are inadequate the weight a 1950s car, which was great, your parents and grandparents to remember the 1950s chevy or whatever cause it as being this wondrous car and it was. if i said this is your car, no air-conditioning, antilock brakes, terrible pick up on the road, you would probably go not such a great thing. so trade numbers which we talk about being old in the sense of nations tended to get revenue out of farming or tariffs on trade. trade numbers act as if everything that we buy and purchase is made in one place, in one country. i think in the 1950s when a

lot of the initial rules were codified, even in the 1980s, the idea that an iphone, a washing machine is made in a factory in one country and is either sold or bought in the country were sent abroad to another place as an export made some sense. there might've been parts that were different but they're usually parts that were sourced locally. think of detroit. a lot of the parts came from toledo msu came from pittsburgh. but today an iphone which in many ways is the quintessential american product, invented by this quirky genius in silicon valley headquartered in california. on and off the largest company in the world. every time an iphone gets sold in the united states, it registered as an import from china. why? 6 billion, 750 at the ipad were probably about $10 billion a year in those devices alone, i

pulled -- apple devices add to the trade deficit because they're made in factories in southern china. they get made in a factory and get put on a ship and a shove on long beach and they get a wholesale price which is the price that apple puts on a. isn't really? is anything that we now use really made any one country, whether the t-shirt wear cotton comes from one country, and the pattern comes from another and the swatches, and they are a symbol. it is clear the iphone is assembled in a factory in china. it is not clear that $220 or $250 goes from the united states to chime every time one is bought because if you break down the iphone which a bunch of economists have done and what your position for economic operation and development have done, you find that are parts from germany and parts from

create an parts from taiwan and plastic from somewhere else and parts from america, and above all, intellectual property from the u.s. in a world of trade numbers that assume an object has a final substantive transformation in one country, with no way of breaking any of that downed. >> host: the fact it doesn't even sell here in this country for what it is marked down in the trade deficit. the retail value it first came out was $499. but nobody ever paid that much because of agreements with cell phone carriers your. >> guest: you can do this for every manufacture and many of the goods that aren't manufactured as heavily like furniture, clothing. you would find thei the way in h valley is dispersed in global supply chain and we just don't know how to capture with a set of numbers that assume a thing is made in one place whereas today, most things are made everywhere. the boeing 787 dreamliner, design this plane on an autocad

and then sourced parts from dozens of countries around the world. every time it gets old when boeing sells one from exactly the japan airlines, it shows up as a u.s. export. it's not in the way that we assume value at close. we are doing i think a bad job capturing. the worst news is i don't have we changed it. no one is going to spend billions of dollars to break down hundreds of thousands of goods into various components. right now we are stuck with the figures we have, but it's creating an optical of what's going on globally that is profoundly wrong. >> host: in addition to the complexity of living in a global world, using these numbers, you have the fact that these indicators, many of them, have been and continue to be mired in controversy. in terms of come to talk a bit about the complexity that went into the decisions about what

you count and what you're not going to count. think about it, we didn't talk about which you devote a chapter in your book too, inflation. there is probably on a daily basis no more controversial issue in the cost of living in this country because people believe government gives out a certain level so that they can keep down so sure to benefits that they have to pay out, or so businesses don't have to pay their employees as much. it's just this constant source of tension which is all the more remarkable given the kind of crazy decisions that go into deciding how this is come up with and whether or not it actually is a very good indicator of anything. >> guest: part of it is a misunderstanding of what inflation as a government consumer price index is supposed to be. it's supposed to measure systemic price to deliver it is not supposed to tell whether not our cost of living is commensurate with our income, whether we are able to meet our needs or our desires or both

relative to what we expect. inflation becomes is real no of peoples experience of their economic lives versus their expectations versus their ability to me. human memory around prices is actually terrible. it is clear from inflation numbers as measured by the government's consumer price index that the amount of money you and i spent as a percentage of income on food and fuel has gone down dramatically since the 1950s. that's not our daily experience of meeting our needs. to be fair i think inflation numbers that are kept by the government are amongst the more reliable, and some of the attempts to do different methodologies, google started creating its own inflation index because it is all this information flowing through its servers. mit economists said instead of sending out really expensive service, which costs hundreds of millions of dollars, have a computer program that takes online pricing in real-time. what's interesting is they don't diverge all thought for more

official inflation numbers. the problem is what's the question industries and versus what are the expectations which is placed on the publicly? they are not meant to tell us our cost of living but that's how we -- is a problem with inflation is the facets of goods change but we are no longer buying land lines and we have cell phones. so many of our government statistics are dependent on government statisticians call you on the phone at home. if you don't have a phone at home, if you have a cell phone, if you're 25 and you don't have a landline, the odds of you being reached by the surveys is de minimis because there want to mess up the sample set. you don't know where someone is in the cell phone because you can take with you anywhere. 25 year olds don't have to answer survey questions in nearly the same rate. so there's a whol whole other ie but cyberwar of even getting our information from? >> host: you have fun stories

in the book about the quality of putting together some of the samples. you had the first i think unemployment calls that went out and your talk bout how a lot of these people who are hired to do this were hired by the roosevelt government as part of the government worker program. they did necessary know what they were doing and apparently the product back then -- >> guest: it's a boring job to knock on doors and say are you employed? watch her profession? a bunch of guys to start filling out the forms themselves. there are lingering suspicions. we had from the 2012 election about whether or not these are numbers that are cooked or somehow manipulated. i think the likelihood of that is really low. but there are such coveted entities now with such a vast databases going into them that you do have to ask what are we measuring versus what do we think we're measuring. >> host: you do have a lot about controversies, and because

way back. the labor federation was a fierce critic of some of these numbers and believed they were being put out to deem the union can to make it harder for working people. then you go all the way up to the point you just me, jack welch, 2012 the was an argument about whether or not the unemployment report had been juked in some way. the question i have for you is, isn't it may be fair for people to wonder that to some degree? only because your book in fact is all about the kind of history behind some of this, social crusader who wanted to use these numbers to some degree to great a new social order and justice in the country and that was a lease part of the motivating idea behind these indicators. >> guest: i think most of the people and the technocratic, bureaucratic stat addition, just

trying to answer the question. and if anything, because of that are not able to do with these larger questions of to what degree, even if they are perfectly done, what are they measuring versus what is the world we currently inhabit? the conspiracy questions almost a secondary one relative to the promise of these numbers versus what actually deliver is the real issue, and the hubris of policymakers utilizing these numbers and economists in particular as it their absent patterns that emerge that you can then know. one of the things i'm most passionate about is, we will talk about for a minute when president obama gets up in 2009 and makes his speech announcing the stimulus bill and says with this $787 billion bill we will create or save 3.5 million jobs. i want to make this clear. this is not a partisan critique of the stimulus plan. what fast they need is what allows the leader of the country to get up and make with such

specificity a dollar amount of spending with a job creation number that is specific? that was -- roosevelt, lincoln nobody else got up. if you said was been a lot of money because there's a problem and it will be good. that's one kind of statement but to make a formulaic number we'll spend x amount and create why cannot th the jobs and that coms out of believe we have enough information and updated and enough of these numbers that we know when government spends a certain amount this amount of jobs gets graded. but if these numbers were all invented in the middle of the 20th century, we don't know a lot. we don't know nearly as much as we think we know to make those kinds of statements on a routine basis. the democrats and republicans do this about all spending bills. we project out what we think the effects going to be. the cbo which i'm critical of, not that they're doing a bad job, but how can we know with any degree of certainty the

outcome of these things. >> host: this is happening at a time and you make this point as well when infected economy has become more complex, more difficult to govern. you have a government that on the one hand has become ever more self-assured about its don't demand is thing called the economy even as this thing called the economy has become ever more unmanageable gasbag not only unmanageable but global. the economy assumes the nation is the same thing. every economy is national. we've been talking for 20 years, which we believe in a global economic system, and this is doing everything we buy, backed to the iphone, the boeing plane. we live in a global supply chain. we live in a world where money is globally. the idea that is set in 1950s national numbers can adequate serve a as our map in a 21st century world of global international interchange and then adding the role of technology. how do you measure -- there was a information technologies of the kind we have now both of

which we use for free but don't have a marketplace. the only way some economists now are trying to get what is the economic output of free applications is to think of, well, we all value our time if we are working so if you're getting paid $30 an hour, $20, you take 50 minutes to go on google, you are valuing your google time at a quarter of an hour of your work. multiply that by the amount of hours people spend on google. that's a way to get at it but is that the way to get at a? we don't know how to measure the output of google. >> host: in addition to the hubris which mentioned, and the controversy and the kind of inadequate see a global world of how well they can actually predict anything. you have this fu funding about e difference between leading and lagging indicator. the idea of a viking indicator is just weird to begin with. ithere's also the fact that thee things have become, and maybe actually it's justice to the politicians that helped inspire

the creation of these leading indicators, they are very interwoven with politics today. going all the way back, we talked about hoover and the fact here he drove so hard to try to get some measure of unemployment, and it being been indian because people that unemployment was quite bad. >> guest: he creates a numbered and then gets used against him. i do think that is part of it although again every country in the world now, think of the chinese government. they have made their entire central legitimacy and to maintain a level of gdp growth and employment creation that is statistically manifest. these numbers have become our latter-day version of land and empire. we measure our national strength based on what these numbers tell us, and so we literally invest them with this huge amount of weight. it's impossible for them to not enter a political debate and

political dialogue, even though again i thought we are captured on one aspect of the world we're living in because it's not like there's this major global move for anyone's good spent a lot of money to reinvestigate our statistical framework for the 21st century. >> host: you also mention not just china but argentina. it became a bit of a global pariah because people felt it was cooking its indicators. >> guest: they really did try to. 2008, 2009 they inspired what would've been our bureau of labor statistics inflation department because they were routinely reported higher inflation than they wanted to be reported. it was undermining their claim the economic stewardship. i mean, it gets absurd and i'm sure there's an equivalent in venezuela and north korea doesn't have a statistical agency. they have a set of numbers they write down. the group that got fired kind of set up a nonprofit group to then

be the due diligence group, and then the argentine government strips them of the nonprofit status and presents -- prevents them from being the watchdog. that's one saving grace. >> host: let me ask you this and i want to double that about what we do about all of this. before i do, if you went back and looked at the world prior to these the indicators, are we even better off now? >> guest: i think we were better off. >> host: that we created more problems than we fix tragedy i think the problem today is it does hinge on a belief, if this is true no matter where you are in the political spectrum that you can capture what's going on statistically and manipulate it effectively. business cycles have become less intense. the worst of our up and agitate even 2008, 2000 are not near as good as they were throughout the 19th century or before that. we have removed food famine on the one hand for most of the world, even with the problem,

not a food problem. and we've removed the worst of economic cycles so you don't get some of the workforce at work, you to get people literally on the streets by the millions. >> host: you think this is in part because -- >> guest: because we learned something about economic systems. that's very different than how to deal with changed reality. i think we're really good at managing the economic systems of the past. my real concern is we are again flying by with economic systems of the present losing the only map we've got. >> host: you talk some in the book about movements by some to create different indicators as it were, and have established story -- you open the beginning of the book with the speech, this is a long running think that robert kennedy gave all the way back in the '60s saying, railing against gb and saying we ought to be measuring our competence and a way to educate

our children, and all these other things that make up the great and good america. you still see that dissatisfaction with attempts by others to come up with something better. >> guest: there was a big gdp backlash in the '70s part because of gdp was seen as encapsulating major realism and materials society versus the softer societies that are important in a society. happiness. that's where the small kingdom of bhutan said we ought to be measuring aggregate happened to us that individual happiness and all the westerners but since pentagon this would be great if we would measure happiness. forget that their happiness was pretty selected. a lot of us would be unhappy with their happiness. again, the issue there is not is that a better way to measure something that gdp fails to measure? it's the idea that you could come up with one number that adequately tells you anything meaningful about the world you're living in, whether it's economic or otherwise.

one number for 320 million americans. one number for a million new yorkers are enemy people in bhutan. what good does one number to you? one number is always an average of something. made it into something about the system within assistant and an aggregate since. gdp does he really very little about most questions we have as americans about quality of life, sustained economic growth, whether or not economic activity today in the president is likely to be sustained and augmented in the future. all output is neutral. if there are two hurricanes do more that's good for gdp because you spend a lot of money clean up after a hurricane but it's not like you would say to fix america's economic woes we should just have five hurricanes. gdp would say that's a perfectly fine way of doing it. the question is what are our questions? i'm trying to help people, kind of myself, say we should start with the questions and then find

numbers and find statistics that help us answer them. because all those numbers were created initially to answer a question, a really important question. it's when it gets detached from the question to me to answer and get enshrined that this is an important number that we have real problems to the people who created these numbers understood that the enshrined in as absolute. and forget with a remit to answer in the first place. >> host: this is your idea with this, rather than coming up with an alternate different indicators, but rather as you said, they spoke of indicators. turn this entire paradigm on its head and say, what is the question that we are trying to answer and then look at the vast range of data out there and get that. >> guest: i like this idea because it means made-to-measure. what are you trying to measure and why? gdp has become come you're supposed, gdp was supposed to go

because when it grows people's incomes go up in people's called it of life gaza. what we're seeing today in a lot of parts of the work is, in fact, gdp can grow quite a bit without income going up. if a robot in factories went to produce often at people and what people used to produce, that factories out that can go up without creating any new jobs. so the question is our collective answer going up if gdp goes up? it may not be true. the question is how to have asked let's go up to visit and welcome visiting badly? we have more information than ever before about all these things. >> host: counties, geography. >> guest: and the one real defense of these never stay being collected is that underneath every number is vast of us of information the hundreds of tables, every unemployment report, dozens and dozens, every official report comes with eight different alternative by geography, by consumption. that information is useful. we don't use that information.

when you get into the business at an individual level then you have to start going these numbers do what? if i told you gdp is going up 2% are down 2%, and the national association of mortgage said that there was x number of mortgages and house price was asked, would you can decide to buy a house or not white house based on that? i would hope not. i fear many people are. >> host: wouldn't some of his just involve to going back to even the most basic themes? if you're in business you want to get a good sense of where things are headed in your particular industry. why wouldn't you just look at prices traffic exactly. the price is just the area that pertain to your industry. one thing is interesting is think of them example but if you want to buy a home today, the thing you need to know is home prices and a 10-mile radius, what's the local economic system that's going to support the price of the home including your own unemployment, your own

employment reality and is that going to give you a loan. you can do that by going to a cello or eight different apps that give you all the homes that were bought in the last 30 days but if want to do that 10 years ago, i'm not so sure how you would get that information. he could've gone to city hall, might've been a six day like the it was hard to get that information to its really easy now. the information that we have that we need is really easy to obtain and information that we think is really easy to obtain, i.e. these national numbers, are completely irrelevant to the questions we have. >> host: do you advocate we get rid of them? >> guest: i don't. they are the justification for a lot of the effort -- information to give policymakers use the more wisely and look, this is a great thinker i did write about and make a statement with the full awareness of the likelihood of that is minimal. but if, if we all woke up tomorrow and wisdom and maturity, there was an outbreak of wisdom and maturity on capitol hill, like a really good

disease, you could use things like the employment numbers to really get at where are the implement issues in the united states and why are they happening, which is very different that a national rate that acts like it's the same in bethesda that it is detroit, that it is in las vegas. >> host: a comparative value house of. >> guest: have a dataset of him a dataset of them how you can compare how things are now versus either within. i more skeptical that the methodologies is always change. change the data with the methodology but i think the sets are not as useful as we think there. i don't think reading is a go back to 1970 and go well, you know, with the effect energy needed to do jobs because we assist in an age of a factor today and the nature of employment. >> host: one of the other things you mentioned is maybe what we need is a spectrum of