Member-only story
Don’t be seduced by the numbers and charts measuring the coronavirus — they are all wrong (including mine)
By Kent R. Kroeger (April 12, 2020)
“The government are very keen on amassing statistics. They collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But you must never forget that every one of these figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just puts down what he damn pleases.”
— Josiah Stamp (1880–1941), an English industrialist, economist, civil servant, statistician, writer, and banker
Barely a month into the coronavirus pandemic, the congressional Democrats and Republicans are already viewing this human tragedy through their narrow, partisan lenses.
And it was only two weeks ago they were working so well together, when the Congress passed and President Trump signed the $2 trillion bailout bill — U.S. history’s greatest wealth transfer from the U.S. Treasury to wealthy Americans.
That is what Democrats and Republicans can agree on when the American people are preoccupied with whether to go to the grocery store to re-stock their water and food supply, thereby risking coming down with the scariest virus since the fictional Andromeda Strain.
