The truth and nothing but, er, like the truth

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." This quotation, normally attributed to former British prime minister Benjamin Disraeli, says a lot about the way people regard official statistics.

The German-speaking world also has a nice expression about statistics, which translates as "don't believe any statistics that you haven't falsified yourself".

As I said here on Monday, I love numbers, but I particular like ones that are true. It was for this reason, rather than out of any naive belief in the goodness of politicians, that I was shocked on Wednesday to read the following headline on the front of the Financial Times: "Fake Greek data criticised".

This wasn't really a new story at all. It had been known for some months that the Greek government had been massaging its official budget deficit figures to present a much rosier picture of its public finances.

In October 2009, the Greek government admitted that its 2009 budget deficit would be 12.5 per cent of gross domestic product (GDP), rather than the figure of 3.7 per cent it had claimed in April 2009.

The news story this week was that the European Commission condemned Greece for, as the Financial Times reported, "falsifying data about its public finances and allowing political pressures to obstruct the collection of official statistics". The Commission believes that even 12.5 per cent of GDP may be an underestimate for 2009's deficit.

Not surprisingly, the new Greek government blamed the old ones for the statistic abuse. "We are changing the way statistics are collected and analysed," said the finance ministry. Few Greeks will have much faith in that statement and nor, one suspects, will the financial markets.

Greece is not the only country to massage its figures, of course. Governments in richer countries such as Britain and Germany have also been accused — at least by their political opponents — of manipulating the way the unemployed are counted to keep the figures down.

Governments falsify official statistics. Companies massage their accounts. Newspaper and magazine publishers — though not Spotlight Verlag — manipulate their circulation figures. And so the web of deceit grows ever more impenetrable.

Greece's new prime minster, George Papandreou, studied briefly with me at the London School of Economics in the early 1980s. (At the time, his father, Andreas, was the country's leader.) We had lots of courses about statistics, but none about falsifying them.

So come on, George, get your country's house in order and start telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.