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see website for terms. Good morning. Welcome to Axios today. We've made it to Friday. It's August 14. I'm Nailaboodoo. Here's how we're making you smarter today. Fortnite takes on Apple and Google,

plus how and why smaller towns across America are confronting racism.

But first, our reliance on unreliable data is today's one big thing.

How we measure our economic health depends on many things, not just evictions, bankruptcies, or

savings rates, but also statistics, lots of them.

We are in this kind of epistemic fog and it's making policymaking much harder than it really ever has been in the past.

Felix Salmon is our chief financial correspondent.

He's here to cut through that fog and explain his skepticism about the accuracy of

these numbers right now.

The pandemic has not just hit the economy, it has hit our ability to measure the economy.

And unless we know how badly the economy is doing, it's really hard to know what we are supposed to do about it.

You look at something like what was GDP growth, what's inflation, what's unemployment,

all of these things come from surveys, what we're discovering looking at the way

that these economic statistics are put out is they're still the best statistics out

there but they're just much less reliable than they used to be. So let's take the jobless rate there was a period a couple of months ago

...