Moneyball Economics came out with a piece on its so-called “Vice Index” this week that tracks gambling, alcohol, drugs, and prostitute spending. It says that the Vice Index is trending down. Therefore the economy is in trouble.

Economists are always looking for the perfect index to predict future trends. Not only is there no perfect index. Try as you might, there is no way to accurately index human activity and decision-making. All an index can tell you is how much of a certain activity the indexers were able to record in a certain month, which might tell you something if there’s a drastic and sudden change somewhere, or if the index is taken over a very long period of time, like 10 or 20 years. We can try to triangulate trends by using many different indexes, but even this is not an exact science. The bigger the number that the statisticians are trying to index and the wider range of activity it covers, the less precise it will be, and therefore the less useful.

That said, I can’t think of a less useful index than the Moneyball Economics Vice Index. This index attempts to jump two hurdles over what other indexes are trying to do. Most indexes try to track legal activities that people are not actively trying to hide. This itself is impossible to do 100% accurately, but at least more information can be gathered. But the Vice Index attempts to track the most elusive of activities – illegal vices like drugs and prostitutes, together with gambling and alcohol.

The Federal Reserve can’t even give you a scientifically accurate number of how much money is in the Federal Reserve System on any given week and warns that all numbers are estimates and can change. How then can a bunch of people at Moneyball Economics give anyone an accurate number of how much under-the-table cash is being transferred for drugs and hookers? Do the hookers and drug dealers report their revenues to them directly, making sure the phones aren’t tapped?