Our current tendency to take our economic blood pressure every few minutes, and then confuse short-term events for significant trends, obfuscates thought on many problems....

Our compulsion to turn every scrap of bad news into a full-blown crisis distorts our perspective and neglects to remind us that trouble may be news but it is by no means new....

Just as we find it increasingly difficult to determine when we know something, so it is also more difficult to decide what we know, for the line has been blurred between random information (otherwise known as "data") and the reality about which we need to be informed.

The incessant production of new data and its instantaneous communication create a paradox: information, the thing that eliminates uncertainty, now increases everybody's feeling of insecurity because of the failure to convert data into knowledge....

There is more than a little truth in the remark of a former British Chancellor of the Exchequer that there was no balance-of-payments problem in the nineteenth century because there were no balance of payments statistics....

Under the banner of protecting the small investor, the Securities and Exchange Commission now requires reams of data that are so comprehensive no small investor could possibly get anything out of them....

Our ability to discern what is important and what is not may be impaired if we are inundated by a sea of numbers. Too many numbers may make the decision-making process harder, not easier.