The Numbers Racket

In the late 1980’s, visitors to the Soviet Union noticed that milk was no longer reliably available in ordinary grocery stores. Meanwhile, back in Langley, Virginia, the Central Intelligence Agency was busy churning out elaborate quantitative assessments that showed Soviet economic growth to be proceeding at an impressive pace. According to the CIA, milk production was a particularly vibrant sector of the Soviet economy, the country’s per-capita output being some 40-percent higher than that of the United States.