ABSTRACT
A distinctive characteristic of the ‘new economy’ is its historically unparalleled reliance on information, and especially on numbers and data. The quantification of human civilization and the advent of computers have diminished the cost of generating and handling large volumes of data, leading to a ‘numbers explosion’ during the second half of the twentieth century. While quantities have been expanding dramatically, their quality has advanced only modestly. Mismeasurement of economic variables, missing observations, and administrative intervention to re-form the data for political purposes all detract from the reliability of economic data. Bad numbers, in turn, may have devastating repercussions in scientific inquiries, governmental policies and actions, and policy evaluation.
