When you fire the statistics collection people for true-but-bad news, you guarantee that you fly blind going forward, as people wont tell you bad news anymore.
We simply can’t trust government stats after this.
When you fire the statistics collection people for true-but-bad news, you guarantee that you fly blind going forward, as people wont tell you bad news anymore.
We simply can’t trust government stats after this.
Stalin already tried that tactic and it didn’t work … no matter how many people you hire, fire, change, disappear or remove, world facts and reality doesn’t care how powerful and important you think you are.
It didn’t? Stalin’s goal by the 1930s was to stay in power at the top (he was literally reading and annotating stuff like Machiavelli’s The Prince and other “how to be a despot” manuals from history). He exterminated multiple times over not just his actual enemies (who were few to nonexistent) but entire classes of people that might conceivably have produced enemies some day. And he died of natural causes (probably). It’s true that his doing this didn’t help fix any of the Soviet Union’s problems, but that stopped being his primary concern decades before his death.
It happened with Mao too. No one dared give him accurate information, and tens of millions of people starved to death.