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A happy slightly-belated April Fools’ Day! (It’s after midnight on April 2, but, on the other hand, I don’t consider the day to have ended until I go to bed. So there.)

The web is full of silly posts today; this website, bold in its conformity, will be no different. Today’s selection is a bit of a re-run; Alina Stefanescu tipped me off to this April Fools’ 1995 article from the Economist:

THE new field of empirical mathematics (EM), a discipline pioneered in the early 1970s by P.G. Somerset and elaborated by V.M. Singh, has already scored some notable successes. Among these are a shortened procedure for the renormalisation of transintegers and refinement of Haberlein’s encryption algorithm. EM, as its name suggests, seeks advances in mathematical theory by means of counting things. As might be expected, the development of computer technology has allowed far more rapid and comprehensive counting of things than previously possible.

It is the belief of the present authors that our work in progress may constitute EM’s most important advance to date. In the course of conducting routine surveys of things counted so far, we discovered that the number of things tended generally to increase more than it decreased. Among the things that proliferated were (in alphabetical order) area of the universe, cable television channels, crime, Economist columns, four-minute milers, lawyers, persons with jobs, persons without jobs, population, potholes, tarts, torts, toxic wastes, video games and weevils. Some things did, of course, decrease. However, our statistical analysis demonstrates to a high degree of confidence that a strong element of hysteresis, or lag-induced upward stickiness, is present in the numbers of things. Put simply, on average everything is proliferating.

This would seem puzzling. Given the conservation laws of natural science, one would expect to see a rough balancing of things that became more numerous with things that became fewer. The persistent upward drift in the average number of things–or burgeoning, as the news media call it–suggests that what is changing is not things themselves but rather numbers. Numbers are losing their value over time; counting any given array of things requires slightly more numbers each year. We refer to this phenomenon as number inflation.

…

A great many previously puzzling phenomena are now explained–or, more accurately, seen to be illusory. For instance, many have wondered why ever-more athletic records are broken every year. The answer is that adjusted for number inflation, human athletic performance turns out to have been roughly constant over time. Similarly, astronomers devote much attention to the apparent fact that the universe is expanding. Since the universe cannot expand forever (eventually it will run out of space and bump into something), this hypothesis seems less than satisfactory; and, indeed, when proper integer-value adjustments are performed, the expansion of the universe proves to be an artifact of number inflation.

It is, however, in the realm of human affairs and social policy that the implications are richest and most consequential. For example, in America a widely noted phenomenon is the consistent tendency of budget deficits to increase despite all efforts to reduce them. Why should something grow even when cut? Because, of course, what needs to be deflated is not the deficit but the digits.

(The best part about this is that the satire is even better for those of us who are praxeologists. After all, are the findings of number inflation any more ridiculous than the idea that forcing banks to give money away for free is an effective way to encourage productive investments, or that taking billions and billions of dollars worth of human labor and blowing it up in another country is an effective way to increase overall wealth? Yet these are typical results produced by the practitioners of empirical economics…)