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Put something in the form of statistics, and it takes on the air of established fact. But as you acquire experience with statistics, they start to look more like educated guesses. And when you realize that a given set of statistics has been deliberately manipulated, that’s when the real trouble begins.

The current issue of Harper’s magazine carries an article by Kevin Phillips, who recently published a book titled “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.”

In the article, Phillips contends that crucial benchmarks such as the Consumer Price Index, the gross domestic product and the monthly unemployment figure are not just inaccurate, but have been fine-tuned by politicians during the past 40 years to make their management of the nation look good.

Phillips suggests that actual U.S. unemployment is around 8 percent, not 5 percent; that inflation has been running at about 5 percent, not 2 percent; and that we have had average annual growth of about 1 percent, not between 3 and 4 percent.

One administration after another has found ways to make numbers conform to wishes rather than reality. Under President Kennedy, the government took the out-of-work people who had given up on finding a job and removed them from the “unemployed” category.

Nixon separated “core” inflation from the more volatile elements of the economy, even though those volatile elements are the ones that drain our wallets most efficiently.

The Reagan administration manipulated housing figures to cool down the apparent inflation rate.

Bad statistics have consequences. Phillips argues that “the illusion of low inflation” led to unrealistic lending policies that triggered today’s credit crisis. We need better information – but we would also need to brace ourselves.

“The real numbers, to most economically minded Americans,” Phillips writes, “would be a face full of cold water.”