Justin Wolfers

It turns out you must have been through one of those intersections where there's a gas station on every corner.

Turns out when there's two gas stations next to each other, they usually have pretty much the same price.

So therefore, if we only surveyed one of those gas stations, we'd have a pretty good guess about what's going on with gas prices.

That analogy holds more broadly.

Often a chocolate bar that's sold in one store is sold at the same price as another store.

Could be in the old days we were surveying both stores, today we just survey one store, but realise as long as that correlation remains high, that we still have pretty accurate measurements.

So I am going to continue to say we should trust the statistics,

But if you want to go deeper, we can talk about exactly what it is they mean.

And I think that's the harder question.

actually currently the worst on record right and yet the government though reports gdp growth is up or this is so how do we make sense of that really good question so the first thing is realize these what the government's measuring things like gdp or employment is one thing how people feel about the economy is a different thing so of course when you measure two different things they don't have to be the same so one possible reconciliation is that people feel really bummed out

even as they continue to spend and produce and so on.

Another possibility is when you look inside, how do we actually measure GDP?

It's very complicated and there's lots of ways in which it could be wrong.

It later gets revised as we get better data and it could be consumer confidence is right and actually the economy is not humming along.

Let me give you another story.

I think this really gets to how I'm going to bore all of your audience.

And I'm not going to apologize for it, but I think it's a great example that you raised here, Ben.

The University of Michigan is doing the most, and I don't work on this survey, but they're doing the most honest job they can calling, I think it's 500 Americans every month, might be a thousand.

I think it's 500.

And they asked them about how they feel about the future and so on.