America Needs Real-Time Economic Data to Get Through This Crisis
The country has put its faith in statistics. But the numbers are failing it this time.
Checking the latest Covid-19 numbers has become a daily ritual in many American households. There’s both solace and alarm to be had from the numbers—one person’s comforting plateau in infection rates is another’s alarm at the lack of testing. Still, there’s agreement that no data set matters more right now. It guides life-and-death policy decisions from where to allocate protective equipment and ventilators to when it might be safe to get back to business.
In that context, the traditional indicators by which we gauge the health of our economy seem suddenly inadequate. From the Federal Reserve to Wall Street, there’s a scramble to find a new high-frequency data to map the destruction in real time and help guide the salvage effort. Which means that one lesson of this crisis ought to be that it’s not just pandemics that you need to prepare better for, it’s the rapid recessions that come with them as well.