If you needed any further evidence that the economy is improving, check out this photo.

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t understand economics. You might as well sign me up for Serbo-Croatian. During this past election, everyone seemed to agree that the Number One issue was THE ECONOMY, but what is “the economy”? Is it measured by how many adults are unemployed? By how much money we have to spend? By how much debt a family is buried under? By what the Fed has done of late to tighten or loosen the money supply? And if all of these things are relevant factors, how much relative weight do we give to each?

The economists seem to have as many views as lawyers have legal theories. It’s not like the long, gone old days, when political leaders relied on oracles to tell them what to do. Nowadays, it’s the economists who tell the politicians what direction to take. Unfortunately, Paul Ryan’s favorite economists are singing a different economic tune than the economists employed by Barack Obama. Laurence J. Peter was right when he said that “an economist is an expert who will know tomorrow why the things he predicted yesterday didn’t happen today.” As far as I can determine, even the most noted economists speak in tongues. They surely are aware that it is in their best interest to keep everyone guessing about what they themselves are guessing since, inevitably, your guess is as good as theirs. “An economist,” said Alfred Knopf, “is a man who states the obvious in terms of the incomprehensible.”

But leave it to George Bernard Shaw to provide the bon mot: “If all economists were laid end to end, they would not reach a conclusion.”

They can talk about stocks and bonds and commodities all they want. Stocks and bonds are too volatile and unpredictable for me, and all I know about commodities is that they fall into two groups: goods, which are tangible, and services, which are not. An easy way for me to remember this distinction is that, these days, goods are Chinese and services are American; they make Wal-Mart products, we make Wal-Mart employees.

So, what is economics? It would appear we may have to live with this: economics is what economists do. It is, in the final analysis, a glowing, foul-smelling example of the age old fallacy argumentum ad ignorantiam, where the economist (or a politician such as Paul Ryan), taking advantage of a lack of knowledge among his listeners, impresses his point upon them by confusing them with all sorts of statistics which they are not in a position to analyze or check. Since winter is upon us, a more common term occurs to me: snow job.