Politics now runs on decimal points.
A quarterly GDP figure lands at 0.1 per cent and the country reacts as if a referendum result has just been announced. Government ministers beam. Oppositions howl. Commentators lean forward with furrowed brows. All because of a number so small it is often within the range of later revision.
The Office for National Statistics publishes early estimates that are, by its own description, provisional. Data are incomplete. Surveys are still coming in. Seasonal adjustments are applied. Assumptions are made. Then, months later, revisions quietly follow. A heroic 0.1 becomes 0.0. A supposed contraction disappears. The drama evaporates.
Yet the performance repeats every quarter.
The problem is that we confuse weather with climate.
A quarterly figure is weather. A warm December boosts retail. A wet summer dents construction. A strike, a one off defence contract, a shift in car production timing - any of these can nudge output by a tenth of a per cent. That tells you something about the quarter. It tells you almost nothing about the direction of the economy.
Annual growth is closer to climate. It smooths out the storms and heatwaves. It captures whether output is persistently rising, stagnating or shrinking. It begins to reveal structural issues such as weak productivity, falling real incomes or chronic underinvestment. It is slower, less exciting, and far more meaningful.
That said, even climate data can lag. Quarterly numbers can be early warning signals. The mistake is treating them as verdicts, rather than indicators that need confirming over time.
But climate is dull. Weather is dramatic.
So we obsess over the gust rather than the prevailing wind. A single quarterly uptick is hailed as a recovery. A single downtick is framed as collapse. Both interpretations are usually nonsense. If the annual trend remains anaemic, a good quarter is not salvation. If the annual trend is solid, a soft quarter is not doom.
There is also the small matter of scale. A 0.1 per cent quarterly move, especially once rounded, is barely distinguishable from noise. It is often revised. It may reflect timing quirks rather than real underlying change.
This obsession is not accidental. It feeds narrative. “Growth up” or “growth flat” fits neatly into partisan scripts. “Annual productivity remains weak despite short term volatility” does not. The first wins clicks. The second requires patience.
The result is a public conversation about economics conducted at the level of a barometer reading taken in a gusty courtyard.
Quarterly data matter, but they are indicators, not verdicts. If we want to know whether the economy is genuinely improving, we should look to annual growth, real wages over time, business investment trends and productivity per head. That is climate. Everything else is just a passing shower dressed up as a hurricane.
Until we learn the difference, we will continue to panic at drizzle and celebrate brief sunshine, all while ignoring whether the seasons themselves are changing.
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