This information is dated and some will blow it off as a conspiracy theory but compare what's happening today with what is in the document.
http://www.universalway.org/Foreign/silentweapons.html--snip--
The Household Industry
The industries of finance (banking), manufacturing, and government, real counterparts of the pure industries of capital, goods, and services, are easily defined because they are generally logically structured. Because of this their processes can be described mathematically and their technical coefficients can be easily deduced. This, however, is not the case with the service industry known as the household industry.
Household Models
...The problem which a theoretical economist faces is that the consumer preferences of any household is not easily predictable and the technical coefficients of any one household tend to be a nonlinear, very complex, and variable function of income, prices, etc.
Computer information derived from the use of the universal product code in conjuction with credit-card purchase as an individual household identifier could change this state of affairs, but the U.P.C. method is not yet available on a national or even a significant regional scale. To compensate for this data deficiency, an alternate indirect approach of analysis has been adopted known as economic shock testing. This method, widely used in the aircraft manufacturing industry, develops an aggregate statistical sort of data.
Applied to economics, this means that all of the households in one region or in the whole nation are studied as a group or class rather than individually, and the mass behavior rather than the individual behavior is used to discover useful estimates of the technical coefficients governing the economic structure of the hypothetical single-household industry...
One method of evaluating the technical coefficients of the household industry depends upon shocking the prices of a commodity and noting the changes in the sales of all of the commodities.
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