This would require discarding the extreme Japanophobia that characterises the so-called “revisionists” who are really “regressionists” twice over.

So for two days we sit right in front of the wood stove waiting for our bellies to unbloat so we can stuff them again.

Giuliano: Oh, sister, did you see my cloak? Bianca: Not I, I see none. Giuliano: God's life, I have lost it then

Economics is a messy discipline: too fluid to be a science, too rigorous to be an art. Perhaps it is fitting that economists’ most-used metric, gross domestic product (GDP), is a tangle too. GDP measures the total value of output in an economic territory. Its apparent simplicity explains why it is scrutinised down to tenths of a percentage point every month.