Sir John James Cowperthwaite, longtime finance secretary of Hong Kong, famously forbid the collection of statistics about the economy, lest he be compelled to do something about them.

In principle, public opinion polls provide a check on the possibility of vote-rigging, and prevent editors and campaign managers from anointing candidates no one actually supports. These benefits assume that the polls bear more resemblance to reality than an airbrushed picture of Madonna on the cover of Vogue.

Horserace-style reporting is bad enough, but with polling less accurate than a drunk insurgent with an AK-47 made in Uzbekistan, the result is actually an active distortion. Every election year, the bowtie-and-beanie crowd shows off a shiny new and improved Acme Polling Machine, and like a certain canine, the 16-ton weight always lands on their head instead of the Road Runner's. As a recovering economist, I respect the difficulty of the task before them, much as the pilot in me is amazed by just how reliable our air travel system is, given the million and one variables that have to be effectively accounted for in order to ensure that flying across the North Atlantic in winter is done hundreds of times a day without incident or note.

That being said, if half the flights had to land in Gander and turn back because of the weather, we'd all still be ballroom-dancing our way across the pond on Cunard liners. This isn't high school; you don't get partial credit for showing your work. Every advancement in communication technology appears to have further muddied the waters, and that stuff is going to go places not even Steve Jobs has thought of in the next 5-10 years. At least if a story begins, "Bob Miller, an unemployed meat cutter I found slumped against the bar at Moog's Farm and Tap Room in Nashua shortly before noon, believes Ron Paul is the only candidate telling the truth about the gold standard," the reader is in on the joke.