Jeffrey A. Tucker, founder and president of the Brownstone Institute, warns against placing too much trust in polling data and surveys: “How sure can we really be that the numbers we are given are even based in reality?”
“What if the people who don’t respond to surveys are much different than those who do? What we end up with is data that’s just fuzzier than it used to be…” Tucker quotes an article by Josh Zumbrun in The Wall Street Journal. “This has created an environment in which it’s easy to cherry pick a starting point for data comparisons and come up with nearly any result you would like.”
“If all of this is correct, we don’t really know the inflation rate,” observes Tucker. “We don’t know the GDP. We don’t know the jobs situation. We don’t know expenditures. We don’t know much of anything we cite as a signal of economic health.” [Keep reading]
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture. Follow him at https://x.com/jeffreyatucker and https://brownstone.org/