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

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 19-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

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...

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