Fixating on short-term volatile data is folly

Economics and statistics are intimately entwined.

Many economists spend their time devising more and more intricate ways to estimate, forecast, decompose and otherwise analyse relations between various data series.

Much of what passes for economic commentary is reportage and discussion of new releases of economic data or revisions to previously released statistics. Think of all the times we have heard and seen headlines on unemployment, stock market indices, PMI indices, leading and lagging indicators etc.