“If You Torture Data Sufficiently It Will Confess to Anything”
That’s a wonderfully enlightened statement made by Ronald H. Coase, a renowned British Economist and it applies to enormous swaths of numbers and figures society depends upon. Coase was a British economist and author, the Clifton R. Musser Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Law School, where he arrived in 1964 and remained for the rest of his life. Thus, we Americans can make a small claim on his wit and wisdom. He received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1991.
But our subject today is unemployment in America and, particularly, CNN’s announcement that Jobless claims hit a new 52-year low in the latest government report.
In that context, another of my favorite sayings is “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.”
Jobless claims hitting a half-century low would suggest that ‘happy days are here again’ in the job market, while millions are refusing to return to shit jobs, zero-hours contracts are rampant in the work force, college grads are living with their pa…