A recent article in The New York Times‘ faulted Lawrence Kudlow, recently appointed as chairman of the National Economic Council, for having been “wildly wrong” by, as the Times put it, “denying the existence of recessions while they were already underway during President George W. Bush’s administration.” The Times quoted Kudlow as writing in December 2007, “Despite all the doom and gloom from the economic pessimistas…the resilient U.S. economy continues moving ahead.”
It’s not clear that Kudlow’s December 2007 view qualifies as “wildly wrong.” The nonpartisan National Bureau of Economic Research, which has a committee of eminent academic economists that retrospectively dates recessions, describes December 2007 as “the peak of the business cycle,” meaning that it was both the “last month” of the expansion and the “first month of the recession.” Fourth quarter real GDP growth in 2007 was positive, not negative.
Even if Kudlow was wrong, wildly or less than wildly, in December 2007, he sure had plenty of company. One Times news headline from that month was “Shares Rally on Surprisingly Strong Jobs Data.” The lead paragraph of that news article spoke of “renewed optimism about the outlook for the economy.” Another Times news headline from that month was “Economy Holding Up, Reports Find.” That article began, “Maybe the American economy is not going to keel over just yet, after all. Government reports released Thursday showed surprising resilience in the broader economy.”
That’s why identifying “fake news” is often as much an art as it is a science, writes Ira Stoll.
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