HAIL TO THE GEEK.(The Talk of the Town)(government information)

In the early nineteen-thirties, as the American economy fell to pieces, policymakers in Washington had a serious problem: they had no idea what was happening. They knew that things were bad, but they didn't know how bad, because they had almost no dependable information about the economy as a whole. So Congress, the White House, and the Federal Reserve Board were stuck scrutinizing such thin indicators as steel production, stock prices, and the public pronouncements of Henry Ford.

That changed in 1933, when a small staff of government researchers, led by an economist named Simon Kuznets, came up with a new statistic, which they called "national income." Though crude by modern standards, it was the first reliable measure of national economic performance in American history. Within a few years, the Commerce Department had invented the gross national product and had started analyzing the economy by industry and region, while other agencies were devising ways of tracking inflation and unemployment. Today, the government provides as much solid, objective economic information and analysis in a month as it used to in a decade.

This steady flow of data is easy to take for granted; few things, surely, are as dreary as a soybean-export-price index. But the economy depends on these numbers; they make business smoother and policy smarter. (Recessions after the Second World War, for instance, have lasted about half as long as recessions before it.) This is why, ever since the days of Kuznets, the government's basic assumption, at least when it comes to economic data, has been: the more information, the better, no matter how dismal it may be.

The Bush Administration has adopted a different approach: what you don't know won't hurt you. Consider Thomas Scully, who was, until recently, the head of Medicare and the point man in the White House's effort to get its drug benefit through Congress. Last spring, Richard Foster, Medicare's chief actuary, analyzed the Bush proposal and estimated that it would cost five hundred and fifty billion dollars over a decade: roughly a hundred and fifty billion more than the President had said it would. Scully, knowing that Congress was already leery about the price tag, and that Foster's estimate might sink the bill, made sure that the numbers never got out. As Foster recalls it, Scully said that he'd fire him if they did. Foster kept his mouth shut, and the bill passed the House by one vote. Last January, the Office of Management and Budget issued its own estimate, which echoed Foster's. The bill is expected to cost well over five hundred billion dollars.

Statistical expediency and fiscal obfuscation have become hallmarks of this White House. In the past three years, the Bush Administration has had the Bureau of Labor Statistics stop reporting mass layoffs. It shortened the traditional span of budget projections from ten years to five, which allowed it to hide the ...