As the U.S. economy skateboards along the precipice of a potentially deep and disastrous recession, it’s inevitable there will be carping about the measurements used to tell us how close we are to the edge.

The most oft-heard complaint is that the indicators commonly used to describe the macro economy — the gross domestic product, the unemployment rate, the consumer price index — don’t match the pain and apprehension that ordinary Americans are feeling nowadays, and that is evident in surveys of consumer confidence that have fallen to a 16-year low or worse.

For instance, GDP shows that the economy is still expanding, if feebly. The jobless rate is rising but remains at a relatively low level in historical terms. Prices are also increasing, but the stated inflation rate is nowhere near where it was in the 1970s and 1980s — or even in the early part of the 1990s.

That can’t be right, goes the common refrain; everything has to be much worse. So, why can’t the people who measure these things get it right? What are they trying to hide? The possibility exists that there is nothing much wrong with the statistics, but that doesn’t make good copy — nor does it answer the underlying question about why perceptions differ so much from reported reality.

Hence the populist expression of concern that we ordinary Americans are being manipulated.

Consider this point of view: “We might ponder as well who profits from a low-growth U.S. economy hidden under a statistical camouflage. Might it be Washington politicos and affluent elites, anxious to mislead voters, coddle the financial markets, and tamp down expensive cost-of-living increases for wages and pensions?” That is how erstwhile Nixon strategist and longtime Republican defector and Washington scold Kevin Phillips put it in a Harper’s magazine piece in May that was adapted from his new book, “Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism.”

In his aggressive — and frequently entertaining — analysis of what went wrong in the mortgage crisis and with other recent financial catastrophes, Phillips attempts to make the case that the evolution of U.S. statistics-gathering has amounted to “corruption” of the figures that we rely on to understand the trends affecting the economy — particularly GDP, CPI and unemployment.

Phillips says: “The deception arose gradually, at no stage stemming from any concerted or cynical scheme.”

But nonetheless, he leaves the reader with the impression that government officials are intentionally representing the economy in the best light possible to further their political aims. It might just as easily be charged that he and like-minded critics would have the statistics spun to paint the opposite picture — that things are much worse off than imagined.

Taking issue with Phillips’ broad point doesn’t mean, of course, there isn’t a grain or two of truth to the concern that somehow we aren’t getting a complete picture of what’s going on. The problem for the critics is that, if the statistics were better, the portrait of the American economy still might not look so bad.

Phillips lays out a series of policy decisions that led to an evolution in the way statisticians measure the economy. But few, if any, of those decisions were undertaken in the cover of darkness — or, as he concedes, with the intention to mislead. Very often they came in response to complaints that the old ways of measurement were flawed. And most of the time, the changes in data collection and analysis have represented new and clearer understandings of how a $14 trillion economy that serves more than 300 million people behaves.

The fact is, there are enough statistics about the U.S. economy to give a far more nuanced view than the one provided by the headline figures that Phillips and some other critics grouse about.

Yes, the number of people who aren’t working can be said to be much larger than the figure captured by the unemployment rate, which is a finite statistic calculated in a well-understood and historically consistent way. The Labor Department produces reams of other data that elaborate on just that fact — data freely available in the monthly employment report. No conspiracy there.

And if you don’t like the way the CPI is calculated, there are dozens of other inflation measures, each of which captures different attributes of a very complex subject.

It’s very hard to make the case that the shortcomings in these statistics — such as they may be — aren’t also well understood by those who rely on them regularly. What these statistics do show clearly — because of their detail, consistency and history — is that the relative performance of the economy today is better than might be expected, considering the trouble caused by the mortgage crisis and its fallout.

At the same time, that doesn’t mean many Americans aren’t feeling pinched and that some aren’t suffering. But to say the statistics are manipulated to disguise that fact goes too far.

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