“THE economic history of the last decade will be re-written,” said an ex-adviser to George Osborne, a former chancellor, on Twitter. The statistics community has been rocked by the publication of a research paper, which in effect suggested that the measurement of price changes in the telecoms sector had failed to account for huge technological improvements. Many believe that if the problem is corrected, everything from consumer-price inflation to GDP will need changing too. The saga is part of a broader worry: that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) struggles to measure the economy properly.

The noisy debate over statistical quality has to an extent been encouraged by the ONS itself. Once hermit-like, today it seeks out the views of outsiders. The paper on telecoms was co-written by in-house wonks and external academics. The ONS even allows users to phone in if they have any questions. The person at the end of the line is usually thrilled to explain the finer points of measuring Britain’s trade deficit with Luxembourg.

In the case of telecoms prices, however, the ONS’s attempts at openness at first led more to misunderstanding than enlightenment. It was impossible for the non-specialist to understand the significance of the paper’s findings. The ONS’s deputy chief economist hurried to clear up the confusion. The data in question relates to prices facing firms, rather than consumers, he wrote. Revisions are unlikely to have a big impact on GDP or headline inflation.

Nonetheless, measuring the modern economy is becoming increasingly difficult. Take the retail-sales figures for December, released on January 19th. They showed a sharp month-on-month decline. These figures are seasonally adjusted to account for a surge in spending over Christmas. But that adjustment has become trickier because of the growth of “Black Friday” discounting, which has turned from a day-long affair in physical shops to a week-long bonanza that largely happens online. The latest data probably do not represent what is really happening on the high street.

Black Friday is not the only recent trend to have wrong-footed the ONS. Its data on the gig economy—firms such as Uber and Deliveroo—remain poor. A body of research has concluded that the retail-prices index, one of the headline measures of inflation, is flawed, yet the ONS has not hurried to correct the problems. Future revisions to other sorts of price data may well have a big impact on GDP. The stats wars are not over.