How long were supply chains back then? 2-5 nodes in a typical case?

I'm not saying publishing of statistics is what caused this shit to happen dingus. I'm saying focusing on it exclusively is dumb and it is wiser to look at a granular level. We can't look at this level because once you have a 150 node supply chain how trustworthy are the receipts?

What if your body had a metric as dumb as our high level economic metrics. We'd all be doing our best to get fat as fuck.

I think you have a point, at the resolution of personal liability shit is and has been cooked. Without being able to hold people to account for their misdeeds, misdeeds are de facto allowed and especially when you can obfuscate information. It's Goodhart's law in action, the sector looks good because we're shooting for targets in a heuristic measure but the reality is glum.

Worse is when fundamentals are [effectively] meaningless and everyone is a betting and hoping to pass it on to the greatest fool, even worse when that greater fool is the general public who are too with their own lives to fixate on the intractable nuances of the effects that Algerian hornet slayers are having on the price of tangerines which is buoying banana prices in Rwanada because legislation was passed last week in Kentucky.

Paradoxically, scale and complexity, but also psuedocomplexity (read:obscurantism) drive us towards these heuristics and effectively incentivise deeper cycles of Goodhart derangement. I expect this is a peculiar aspect of America's largess, though. The American cultural diaspora is actually pretty diverse from my experience.