GOL featured in Forbes magazine
Forget BLS. Here’s How To Take The Economy’s Temperature Without Using Government Data
…Joshua Blumenstock, the Director of the Global Opportunity Lab and the co-Director of the Center for Effective Global Action at the University of California at Berkeley, whose research leverages novel data to address economic challenges, says economists call this the Lucas Critique — when the system changes, the relationships you relied on in the past can break. Blumenstock gives the example of Google Flu Trends, a tool developed in 2008 by Google that tracked flu outbreaks by analyzing search data. It worked at first, but as search algorithms and media coverage changed, its predictions became unreliable, overshooting actual flu cases in 100 out of 108 weeks.
That’s all to say that alternative gauges aren’t gold-plated truth, any more than Washington’s stats are divine writ.
With all that in mind, here’s a mix of serious and strange measures you can use to sanity-check the economy. Some will make you nod. Some will make you roll your eyes. All of them should be taken with a grain of salt.
