Doing Research

Researching things is fun. But do we really know how good the information is?

High water at the levee. Sometimes the only things we can trust are our own observations. Sometimes even those are subject to question. Photo by author.

So I was writing a little piece the other day and it contained a sentence about inflation. Now, the article wasn’t about inflation, but in true writer fashion, I decided I needed to use this as an excuse to look up the inflation rates of different countries. And, no, this also is not an article about inflation.

I used the search string, “inflation rate by country.” The results were very interesting. The first link went to a very simple and comprehensive site, tradingeconomics.com. It does exactly that. It lists various economic metrics by country. It gives an indication of how old the data is (it was September and October 2022 when I did the search). There’s no analysis per se, just data. It was fascinating and I spent too much time clicking through various tables looking at numbers.

I could have played on that site all night, but thought that one site is not enough to call the research thorough. I decided to look at a few more of the links. Also on the list were forbes.com, worldbank.com, pewresearch.com and some others.

There was even an ad for info.com, I confess that I did not follow that link. I am suspicious of anyone’s motivations for paying Google to show up on a search page for this subject.