And I don't mean to understate how important it is to restore basic function.

Too often, expert opinion is thought most useful to policymakers when presented as a single definitive interpretation. As a result, experts typically understate uncertainty.

However, since steel trade consists of trade in a large number of different steel products, the global figure may considerably understate the impact of Chinese exports and, particularly, imports on individual markets.

Only 43 of Europeans bothered to vote and many of them deserted establishment parties, often for anti EU extremists. Indeed, the official results understate the extent of popular dissatisfaction many who stuck with traditional parties did so reluctantly, faute de mieux.

And we should also be very careful about the accounting used for derivatives. On this technical but crucial point, US generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP) are considerably more generous (because they understate potential losses) than International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS).

These raw figures on job losses, bad as they are, actually understate the weakness in world labor markets. If you include partially employed workers and discouraged workers who left the US labor force, for example, the unemployment rate is already 16.5 .

But, while strengthening such programs should be a high priority, we should not lose sight of how well middle income families have actually done over the past few decades. Unfortunately, the political debate is distorted by misleading statistics that grossly understate these gains.

More important, these published numbers surely understate the true magnitude of remittance flows, since migrants sending funds home have a choice they can choose between institutional entities such as banks, Western Union, MoneyGram, exchange houses and the like, as well as informal channels.

While standard measures exaggerate youth unemployment, they likely understate adult unemployment, because those who have given up their job search are not counted among the unemployed. As the Great Recession drives up the number of such discouraged workers, adult unemployment rates appear to fall presenting a distorted picture of reality.

A 2009 study by the World Bank found that a 10 increase in fixed broadband penetration boosts a developing economy s GDP by about 1.4 . These findings likely vastly understate the impact of the technology after all, much of the developing world is seeing a rapid rollout of mobile broadband, with much higher capacity than what was available at the time of the study.

Although government statisticians do their best to gauge the rise in real GDP through time, there are two problems that are very difficult to overcome in measuring real incomes increases in the quality of goods and services, and the introduction of new ones. I believe that both of these problems cause the official measure of real GDP growth to understate the true growth of the standard of living that real GDP is supposed to indicate.