Best Quote of the Decade...

And now for something completely different:

The miracle of national accounts statistics is that all over the world, very incomplete, imperfect, and partly outdated datasets are transformed into complete, consistent, and up-to-date standardized pictures of national economies.

This is my professional economics quote for the last decade. It's by Frits Bos, who works for the CPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis, quoted in the Review of Income and Wealth, Series 55, Number 4, December 2009, in his article "The Art and Craft of Compiling National Accounts Statistics and Their Implications for Reliability", on page 930 of that issue.

This is an article that every aspiring economist, especially those who have been working as economists for the last 30 years, should read to understand what the reality of economic statistics is all about. Highly recommended. Really.

Unfortunately (at least I couldn't find it in a short look), not online, but there is a link to his professional home page here. There is an abstract here with access behind Wiley's commercial firewall.