Take your data with a grain or two of salt

A story in today’s New York Times discusses one of the ugly truths of economics: Sometimes people make mistakes.

The article, “On Economy, Raw Data Gets a Grain of Salt,” focused on the enormous faith that policymakers, economists and investors place in financial data, such as the rate of economic growth, despite the fact that such data is often based on crude estimates and gets revised after-the-fact to account for errors, faulty assumptions or new information.