Paul Krugman has been thinking deep meta-thoughts about deep meta-theories, and his foundational analysis of evolutionary biology has been chronicled on a New York Times blog devoted to similar issues.

Krugman celebrates the factuality of biological research, and encourages old-media economists to gather much, much more data from the internet, where graduate students in economics can "download securities prices from Bloomberg and see how blue skies and rain affect the behavior of financial markets." The blog's curator indulges Krugman's fantasy in a made-to-order universe where we can "brutally confront theory with data."

Obviously both of those hyper-intelligent individuals could avoid this sort of "abuse of language" at the price of tedious qualifications which would quickly overburden their readership and leave them talking into a vacuum, and nobody wants that, but nevertheless it may not be entirely out of place to wonder exactly how tedious those qualifications would have to be.

Unfortunately for all of us, the qualifications are endless, and we will never ever "see" a connection between cause and effect, neither on the Bloomberg ticker or even in a physics lab, where visual and conceptual "metaphors" are respectably anchored in standard procedures, but inevitably dissolve into the fog of quantum mechanics before anybody "sees" anything.

So what?

Everybody already knows that data only really "confront" the bleary eyes of weary lab assistants, and what's the harm in a little convenient shorthand for what everybody already knows? Without it no finite person could ever enunciate any kind of theory, economic or physical.

The harm is payrolls shrinking by hundreds of thousands of jobs month after month, and almost every relevant article in the New York Times winding up with a professor of economics somewhere "seeing" light at the end of the tunnel. Happy days are (almost) here again!

Meanwhile simple alternatives to watching this mess get worse, like hiring the unemployed for massive public-works projects which our disintegrating infrastructure absolutely requires anyway, get lost in a fog of Keynesian stimuli or Chicago laissez-aller, and outright destitution is now confronting millions of Americans more brutally than mere data will ever confront anything.

Obama's stimulus was a bastardization of Keynesian deficit spending and Friedman-esque tax cuts, a grab-bag of almost all contemporary economic theories, and only the eyes of faith can "see" much in the way of results, but the same $700 billion package could have employed 6,000,000 people at $3000 per month tax-free for about 40 months, with no theoretical framework whatsoever except giving jobs to the jobless, and if our moribund economy still didn't have a pulse after 40 months, at least tax-payers would have had some brand new bridges and thousands of windmills to show for their money, and 6,000,000 people would have also earned a living for what promises to be three lean, mean years.

But instead we got theories, and "abuse of language."