Politicians: cherry-picking the best stats for your speeches doesn't persuade the public all is well, it persuades them they're being lied to ft.com/content/ac72d1… A worked example follows... 
Philip Hammond's spring speech 2019 (the last "normal" speech of this kind, I think?) rattles off a string of wonderful stats about the "remarkably robust" economy. All are technically correct. But still...
Fastest wage growth - ok, at that moment, in nominal terms (see chart) but this is hardly the stat that matters most to people, which is real terms wage growth, which had been dire for a decade in 2019 (see chart).
When people hear Hammond say "fastest wage growth" in a decade, but they know they still feel poorer than a decade ago, do you think they change their mind? Or suspect Hammond is manipulating/taking them for fools?
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