A Commerce Department official once compared a nation’s statistical system to a tailor, measuring the economy much as a tailor measures a person for a suit of clothes -- with the difference that, unlike the tailor, the person we are measuring is running while we try to measure him.
These phenomena have severely harmed long-term performance, and were not cost-free in terms of welfare: excessive volatility is probably the main reason for our country’s economic stagnation in the last three decades of the previous century.