The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ clear and costed, but it was the perfect example of a number being used for symbolic effect. It implied real commitment and risk: the 1p meant almost nothing. ‘If relying on numbers didn’t work,’ said Andrew Dilnot of the Institute of Fiscal Studies in a recent BBC programme, ‘then in the end a whole range of successful number-free politicians would appear.’

      They haven’t appeared yet. The problem for politicians is that they have to use figures to raise public consciousness, but find that the public doesn’t trust them – and the resulting cacophony of figures tends to drown out the few that are important. The disputes of political debate have to be measurable, but they get hung up about measurements that only vaguely relate to the real world.

      Take rising prices. You can’t see them or smell them, so you need some kind of index to give you a handle on what is a real phenomenon. You can’t hold them still while you get out your ruler, yet the ersatz inflation figures have assumed a tremendous political importance. We think inflation is an objective measure of rising prices, when actually it is a measurement based on a random basket of goods which has changed from generation to generation. In the 1940s, it included the current price of wireless sets, bicycles and custard powder. In the 1950s, rabbits and candles were dropped in favour of brown bread and washing machines. The 1970s added yoghurt and duvets, the 1980s added oven-ready meals and videotapes, and the 1990s microwave ovens and camcorders. It’s a fascinating measure of our changing society, but it isn’t an objective way of measuring rising prices over a long period of time.

      II

      ‘Oh the sad condition of mankind,’ moaned the great Belgian pioneer of statistics, Adolphe Quetelet. ‘We can say in advance how many individuals will sully their hands with the blood of their neighbours, how many of them will commit forgeries, and how many will turn poisoners with almost the same precision as we can predict the number of births and deaths. Society contains within it the germ of all the crimes that will be committed.’

      It’s a frightening thought, just as it was frightening for Quetelet’s contemporaries to hear him say it in the 1830s. But he and his contemporaries had been astonished by how regular the suicide statistics were. Year after year, you seemed to be able to predict how many there would be. There were the occasional bumper years, like 1846, 1929 and other economic crash periods, but generally speaking it was there. People didn’t seem to be able to help themselves. Amidst a constant number of individuals, the same number would take it into their heads to murder as much as get married. Statistics were powerful.

      Quetelet was among the most influential of the statisticians trying to solve the confusion of politics by ushering in a nice clean, unambiguous world, urging that we count things like the weather, the flowering of plants and suicide rates in exactly the same way. ‘Statistics should be the dryest of all reading,’ Bentham’s young disciple William Farr wrote to Florence Nightingale, explaining that they could predict with some certainty that, of the children he had registered as having been born in 1841, 9,000 would still be alive in 1921.

      To help the process along, Quetelet invented the dryest of all people – the monstrous intellectual creation, l’homme moyen or Average Man. Mr A. Man is seriously boring: he has exactly average physical attributes, an average life, an average propensity to commit crime, and an average rather unwieldy number of children – which used to be expressed as the cliché 2.4. But Average Man only exists in the statistical laboratory, measured at constant room temperature by professional men with clipboards and white coats. The whole business of relying on numbers too much goes horribly wrong simply because Mr Average is the Man Who Never Was – counted by people who know a very great deal about their profession or science but precious little about what they are counting. The Man Who Never Was measured by the Men Who Don’t Exist. It’s the first and most important paradox of the whole business of counting:

      Counting paradox 1: You can count people, but you can’t count individuals

      Average Man belongs to the Industrial Revolution and the Age of the Masses, but we just don’t believe most of that Marxist stuff any more. It belongs in the twentieth-century world of mass production, where people were transformed into cogs in giant machines, as pioneered by the great American industrialist Henry Ford – the man who offered his customers ‘any colour you like as long as it’s black’. Mass production and Average Man had no space for individuality. Figures reduce their complexity, but the truth is complicated.

      Now, of course, you can almost have your car tailor-made. You can mass-produce jeans using robots to designs which perfectly match the peculiarities of individual bodies on the other side of the world. The days have gone when clothes issued by the military didn’t fit, when you struggled to keep up with the speed of the production line, with your tasks individually timed for Average Person by the time and motion experts. And we can see more clearly how difficult it is to categorize these widely different individuals who make up the human race. But in the hands of a bureaucratic state, people who don’t conform to the norm get hounded and imprisoned. Or, these days, social workers visit them and remove their children.

      And after all that, when you get to know Mr Average, you find he has a bizarre taste in underwear, he has extraordinary dreams about flying through galaxies, and a hidden collection of Abba records. He wasn’t average at all. Counting him in with other people ignores the real picture.

      Counting paradox 2: If you count the wrong thing, you go backwards

      Because it is so hard to measure what is really important, governments and institutions pin down something else. They have to. But the consequences of pinning down the wrong thing are severe: all your resources will be focussed on achieving something you didn’t mean to.

      Take school league tables, for example. When the Thatcher government latched onto the idea of forcing schools to compete with each other by measuring the progress of children at three comparable moments of their lives, they were intending to raise standards. They probably have done in a narrow way. The trouble was that schools concentrated on the test results to improve their position on the tables, which was anyway pretty meaningless. That meant excluding pupils who may drag down the results, concentrating on the D grade pupils – the only ones who could make a difference in exam result league tables – to the detriment of the others. It meant concentrating on subject areas the school could compete in, never mind whether they were the subjects the children needed. And worst of all, it meant squeezing the curriculum to produce children that can read and write but are, according to National Association of Head Teachers general secretary David Hart, ‘unfit philistines’.

      Then there was the business of using hospital waiting lists as a way of measuring the success of the health service. Tony Blair’s new government made an ‘interim promise’, which then hung around their neck like an albatross, to reduce waiting lists by 100,000. They did push the lists down, though painfully slowly. But the result was the emergence of new secret waiting lists for people just to get in to see the hospital consultant, before they were even allowed near a real waiting list. Quick simple easy operations were also speeded up to get the numbers down, at the expense of the difficult ones. And when the hospital league tables of deaths came out in 1999, consultants warned it would make administrators shy of taking on difficult complicated cases.

      Governments and pressure groups latch onto the wrong solutions and then busily measure progress towards them. They thought that shifting to diesel fuel for cars would clean up polluted air and measured progress towards achieving it. Result: air full of carcinogenic particulate matter. They thought more homework for primary school children was the solution to underachievement and measured progress towards it. Result: miserable dysfunctional kids.

      It has all the makings of a fairy tale. If you choose the wrong measure, you sometimes get the opposite of СКАЧАТЬ