Editor's Corner
Avoiding the Big Lie

Statistics don’t lie. People do. That, at least, was our thinking at Virginia Business when we came up with the concept for our cover, "The State of the State," a few months ago. Our goal was to find the unvarnished truth about Virginia and how it really compares with the rest of the country. We needed statistics to tell the story.

We contracted with Chmura Economics & Analytics, a Richmond economics firm, to analyze what the state’s economic position is relative to the other states, how it is changing and what the quality of life really is. They did the same for the state’s regions.

Why bother? One reason is the Big Lie. Totalitarian states such as Hitler’s Germany or the Communist Soviet Union repeated wildly false information so often that people actually believed it. I saw this in action when I was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1980s. I wouldn’t say that average folk believed the Big Lies, but they heard the fantasies over and over so much that their analytical faculties became too dull to challenge them.

I’m not so worried about the Big Lie here in Virginia, but we do have to watch out for little lies, lest we believe our own hype and boosterism. Are we really "the Digital Dominion," for instance? Is living here as good, relatively speaking, as we think it is? Our report is part of a year long series of stories looking at Growth and Development issues in the state. The series launch in the January issue seemed to be a hit. So, are the Big Lies true? Turn to page 9 to find out.