Is the U.S. economic establishment obsessed with statistical analysis?
Yes. I have the impression that in America the belief in statistics is like the belief in God. I see the most evident failure in American thinking is the high assessment of consumption as the engine of growth. They have a model that says consumption is the biggest and most important demand component in the economy, and when there is sufficient consumption, there will be sufficient investment. That is one of the key postulates in American economic thinking. But Austrian economists say that, in the end, if consumption takes a growing share of GDP, other shares must decrease. If you have too much consumption, you end up with less and less investment and with a growing deficit in the trade balance. This is precisely what we are observing in the United States. This wild consumption boom in history has not created an investment boom – it has killed the investment boom. U.S. Business Economics: 3. If you could replace the focus on statistical analysis with one indicator of the state of the ec
