You seem to be accusing the man of ignoring "obvious" issues to push an agenda to calm people, but I don't think that's fair. 1) The CPI is controversial, bu

You seem to be accusing the man of ignoring "obvious" issues to push an agenda to calm people, but I don't think that's fair. 1) The CPI is controversial, but so is every proposed system to replace it. For the moment, the CPI is the gold standard, and even if it turns out that its universal adoption is as silly as the actual gold standard was, using it is certainly _not_ a sign of pushing an agenda. 2) He specifically mentions what you accuse him of not mentioning - "Even by the highest estimates — which include people discouraged from looking for a job, thus not registered as unemployed — the jobless rate reached around 16 to 17 percent. It’s a jobs disaster, to be sure, but not the same scale as the Great Depression." 3) Fair, there was a destruction of wealth. But I don't see how that would undermine any of his points. And your last un-numbered point about GNP is also kind of silly. There's a reason we use GDP now instead of GNP, GNP doesn't accurately reflect our wealth. One could argue that neither does GDP, but again, using the commonly accepted numbers isn't a sign of deliberately concealing an agenda. There are a billion ways one could measure the economy, and I'm sure we could do better than what we do now. But using them doesn't mean you're deliberately leaving things out in order to push an agenda. It means you're using the vocabulary that economists use.