"Dark Matter" and the Standard of Living
I've long believed that economic statistics dramatically mismeasure actual well-being, understating real gains in the standard of living. (Examples here, here, and here.) For understandable reasons, government statisticians put a premium on consistency over time. But the economy has an annoying habit of changing.
Dan Drezner has a bunch of recent posts on the problem of "dark matter" in measuring how well the economy is doing.