The Trouble with Economic Data: Flawed Metrics, Flawed Decisions

The Michael Shermer Show

Michael Shermer

Dialogue, Science, Reason, Michaelshermer, Natural Sciences, Skeptic

4.4 • 921 Ratings

🗓️ 29 April 2025

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The ways that statisticians and governments measure the economy were developed in the 1940s, when the urgent economic problems were entirely different from those of today. Diane Coyle argues that the framework underpinning today’s economic statistics is so outdated that it functions as a distorting lens, or even a set of blinkers. When policymakers rely on such an antiquated conceptual tool, how can they measure, understand, and respond with any precision to what is happening in today’s digital economy?

Coyle argues that to understand the current economy, we need different data collected in a different framework of categories and definitions, and she offers some suggestions about what this would entail.

Diane Coyle is a Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge and author of The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why it Matters and GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History. Her new book is The Measure of Progress: Counting What Really Matters.

Read Diane Coyle’s new article for Skeptic.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to The Michael Sherman Show.
0:16.7	Today's guest, Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge.
0:23.6	She's the author of Cogs and Monsters, What Economics is and What It Should Be.
0:29.2	All right, we'll get into that maybe a little bit.
0:31.4	GDP, a brief but affectionate history.
0:34.6	Markets, State and People, Economics for public policy, the soulful science,
0:40.7	what economists really do and why it matters. And her new book, here it is, the measure of
0:45.5	progress, counting what really matters. We have an excerpt from this book coming out in the next
0:50.6	issue of skeptic on the health and wealth of nations. I mean,
0:54.2	these are really important topics. Diane, nice to see you. Thanks for coming on to talk to me.
0:58.9	Thank you for the invitation to join you today. So what's your story? How did you get into
1:02.1	economics? What's your background to that, what drew you to that subject? I started out thinking
1:08.6	I was going to be a philosopher. I did a subject called philosophy,
1:11.5	politics and economics at Oxford University's and undergraduate. I had visions of sitting in a
1:16.1	pavement cafe in Paris writing and drinking coffee, but I had a fantastic economics tutor who was
1:22.3	a dedicated teacher which makes such difference in your life, also it was a great example of why economics was
1:29.2	important and interesting, so I stuck with it after that.
1:32.7	That's pretty good, yes.
1:34.5	Yeah, sometimes I wish I would have majored in economics rather than in social sciences and
1:39.5	history of science and so on, because what you guys deal with are really probably the most
1:43.9	important things there are.
1:45.8	I mean, you know, unemployment, inflation, and interest rates and all this stuff that seems to drive the world.
	...

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