The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  But even in Britain, where there was barely a hint of Stalinism, numbers have a strange effect when they are wielded by politicians. Once the 300,000 new homes had been promised and achieved, no politician could dare achieve anything less. Soon a new white paper and government programme (called irritatingly enough, Operation Rescue) was planning to speed up the process by encouraging local authorities to demolish more homes. It was the beginning of so-called ‘slum clearance’, and soon the ‘slums’ – which would now be a gentrified gleam in an estate agent’s eye if they had survived – were tumbling down. Subsidies were given to local councils to get the job done and soon 60,000 homes were being demolished every year.

  To keep the replacements rolling, the new housing minister – Winston Churchill’s son-in-law Duncan Sandys – changed the building subsidies to produce as many flats as possible in the new space. And so high-rise flats were born as a way of reaching the target. Sandys’ successor Sir Keith Joseph went further, forcing councils to use the new industrialized-system building methods, which turned out, too late, to be substandard. The new flats were soon being condemned as damp, vandalized and impossible to let.

  The Profumo affair ushered in a new Labour government in 1964, but the numbers stayed in the ether and the process speeded up, with a new election promise of 400,000 new homes a year. ‘Why not rebuild the whole thing?’ said their housing minister Richard Crossman, peering at a plan of Oldham. Soon a 1967 survey was showing that 1.8 million homes were unfit for human habitation – well over twice what the previous survey had shown a decade before. The quantum effect strikes again.

  It wasn’t long before Harold Wilson’s ministers were enthusiastically discussing the possibility of building half a million new homes a year, and had pushed the annual number of demolitions up to 70,000. Britain’s inner cities were being transformed from civilized though neglected streetscapes into concrete deserts. It was as if the numbers had blinded policy-makers and professionals to the original humane reasons behind the target. Local communities found themselves ridiculed and strong-armed in the name of progress. ‘We are dealing with people who have no initiative or civic pride,’ said a leading planner from Newcastle. ‘The task, surely, is to break up such groupings even though the people seem to be satisfied with their miserable environment.’

  The power of political numbers was hard to turn back, and it took the collapse of the brand new 22-storey Ronan Point in 1968 to begin to turn the tide. It turned out that the crucial joints holding it up had been packed with bits of old cardboard and cigarette ends, and high-rise was soon succeeded by the even less attractive neo-brutalist school of system-built lowrise flats, many of which are unfortunately still standing.

  What had begun as a necessary and enlightened policy had been transformed into a fearsome machine with no human qualities. The bulldozer became a symbol of rampant state power. Many of the resulting monstrosities still hang like a millstone round our necks in the form of unpaid municipal debt, the interest for which we pay through our council tax. And all because of a target number which took control. Or, more precisely, because of counting the wrong thing. But then the number of new flats was easy to count. It was much harder to count the number of families feeling at home in well-balanced communities.

  IV

  After all this, you might be wondering why we count at all. Why do we do something so unpredictable? But numbers are still an absolutely vital tool for human progress. They mean we can begin to test new therapies, judge schools, hospitals and cities. They seek out the fraudulent or inefficient. They still give us some control over our unpredictable world. They can take us by surprise – and it’s in that sense that most of the statistics are used in this book. It’s just that they are not objective, nor the final answer, and we rely on them too much. All too often, policy decisions are taken on the basis of a single number which actually just symbolizes the question, while the truth scuttles away through our hands as we try to snatch it. To make a difference, we have to measure the ethereal, and nobody has told us how to do so.

  Which brings us to the most difficult counting paradox of them all, and the reason why the difficulties in measurement are so important now. Unlike the others, paradox 10 is urgent:

  The more sophisticated you are, the less you can measure.

  This is true for politicians who try to measure the elusive source of ‘feelgood’ in their populations, and long for the days when they knew they could just measure wages. And it is true for the doctors who used to measure disease, but know there is some other kind of psychic health that allows people to recover from operations – but which they cannot count under the microscope. But it’s most urgent for business.

  Business leaders increasingly recognize that the key to success is realizing that their assets are intangible qualities which are extremely hard to measure directly – like knowledge, information or reputation. Count up the value of their fixed assets and you come up with a figure wildly different from the actual value of their company on the world markets. Microsoft is an extreme example. Its balance sheet lists assets that amount to only about 6 per cent of what the company is worth. ‘In other words,’ says the futurist Charles Leadbetter, ‘94 per cent of the value of this most dynamic and powerful company in the new digital economy is in intangible assets that accountants cannot measure.’

  What’s really important can’t be measured. Perhaps we should call that the ‘McKinsey Fallacy’. It may also be why the best things in life are still free. Yet if your competitors are going to try, then you have to try too. For politicians or business strategists, measurement is a growing headache. It isn’t the perennial problem of the two cultures – arts and science will never agree on each other’s primacy. Nor is it the clutter of numbers we live through day by day, though that can be misleading too. It’s that we have reached a point where measuring things doesn’t work any more. When you’re in politics or business and you need to measure the unmeasurable in order to make things happen – and your career and our lives may depend on you being able to do so – then you have a crisis. It is a counting crisis.

  The word ‘crisis’ is overused, especially by people who then launch into a stream of statistics, so I should use the word carefully. It certainly isn’t the kind of crisis which commentators usually trumpet about, and isn’t the kind campaigners can put on a graph – the crisis hasn’t grown by 6 per cent since last February or dropped by three and a half miles – but it is a crisis nonetheless. It is that number-crunchers don’t have the necessary tools for the new world.

  Because of this, we have begun to see some of their methods changing, and strenuous efforts (some brave and exciting, some completely wrong-headed) are now being made to capture in numbers the kernel of truth. And sometimes, a few brave souls have been going further, to abandon the whole idea of numbers altogether and still try to measure the success of places, people and organizations. Their success or failure will determine the kind of world we live in in the new millennium.

  In the meantime, we have to see through the fog to work out what’s really important in life. The difficulty comes when numbers are used to reduce the sheer complexity of life to something manageable. And it was this fallacy which was tackled by Charles Handy, Britain’s answer to the US management gurus, in a lecture he gave to the Royal Society of Arts in London in 1996, called ‘What’s it all for?’. He described this as the ‘fallacy of the single criterion’:

  Trying to find one number that is the sum of everything is misguided. There is never any one number that will actually explain success in life and we are foolish ever to think that it might be there. Money certainly isn’t it. Businesses know very well that profit is not the only measure. Sensible organisations now have about 18 different numbers that they look at. Nevertheless, the myth pervades our society that if you are profitable you are successful. Or if you’re in the public sector, then efficiency is what matters. But efficiency is not quite the same as effectiveness. You can have a very effic
ient hospital if you don’t take in very sick people or people who are not going to get better, like the old ones. So you push them outside. You’re efficient but you’re not terribly effective. Looking for the one number has corrupted our society.

  That sums up the paradox perfectly. The closer you get to measuring what’s really important, the more it escapes you, yet you can recognize it sometimes in an instant. And while 18 numbers are clearly better than just one, there are dangers there as well, because number-crunching brings a kind of blindness with it. When we measure life, we reduce it.

  Which is why Handy ended his lecture with a poem by Shel Silverstein, called ‘The Magic Carpet’, which warns about what happens when you measure life instead of living it:

  I revealed to you a magic carpet that will whiz you through the air

  To health and wealth and happiness if you just tell it where.

  So will you let it take you where you’ve never been before?

  Or will you buy some drapes to match and use it on your floor?

  Bizarre measurement No. 4

  Saros

  (An astronomical cycle used for predicting eclipse. 1 Saros = 18 years, 11 days and 8 hours.)

  * * *

  Number of floppy discs BT believes can store a digital version of every experience in an 80-year life: 7,142,857,142,860,000

  Amount the death rate dropped during a month-long doctors’ strike in Israel in 1973: 40 per cent

  Chapter 4

  Historical Interlude 2: Commissioner of Fact

  ‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed’ said the gentleman, ‘by fact. We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact, and of nothing but fact. You must discard the word Fancy altogether.’

  Charles Dickens, Hard Times

  Think of what our Nation stands for …

  Democracy and proper drains.

  Sir John Betjeman

  I

  Jeremy Bentham was five years old and well into his Latin studies when the House of Commons met for the first time to decide whether to hold a census. It was 1753, and only a matter of months since a furious mob had torn apart the centre of London – enraged by the loss of eleven days to bring the calendar in line with the Gregorian one used on the Continent. Numbers mattered even just in the form of dates. Yet there were actually very few accurate figures. Nobody in England had the slightest idea what the population of the country was, and the prevailing opinion was, with a typical kind of English pessimism, that it was dropping like a stone. Counting people seemed like a good modern idea, which would help the tax authorities, and provide information on the number of paupers. It might even help plan a local police force.

  The man behind the idea was the former secretary of the Prince of Wales and son of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Potter, MP for St Germans – ‘a man of more than middling abilities,’ according to Gentleman’s Magazine, ‘and somewhat conceited of his own parts’. It might perhaps have helped the counting cause if Potter hadn’t been a member of the orgiastic Hellfire Club – motto: ‘Do as thou shalt wish’ – but that was some months in the future, and probably nobody knew at the time. No, the bill was widely admired and showed every sign of being passed into law.

  The fact that Britain did not become the first country in the world to hold a census, ceding that place to Sweden, was down to the sterling efforts of one man. Almost single-handedly, York MP William Thornton mustered enough votes to defeat the idea in a series of bravura performances that stand as a contemporary critique of statistical thinking. In the first division, he was the only MP voting against it. By the time it reached the Lords, he had so stoked up the opposition that they threw it out.

  His main arguments were that this was a back-door attempt to bring in nasty French institutions like the police, and that official counting was a pointless activity that changed nothing and undermined the privacy of true Englishmen. It would also make parish officials much too powerful – just to molest every family in the kingdom for the sake of what he called ‘political arithmetic’.

  ‘Can it be pretended, that by the knowledge of our number, or our wealth, either can be increased?’ he asked fellow MPs. ‘And what purpose will it answer to know where the kingdom is crowded, and where it is thin, except we are to be driven from place to place as graziers do their cattle? If this be intended, let them brand us at once; but while they treat us like oxen and sheep, let them not insult us with the name of men.’

  Quite so, and for good measure, Thornton promised to refuse to give any information to official busybodies. If the officer persisted, he warned, ‘I would order my servants to give him the discipline of the horse-pond’.

  It is easy to laugh from two and a half centuries later, in these days when we count almost everything. Yet there was something rather noble about Thornton’s defence, boneheadedly English for all that in his powdered wig, yet strangely reminiscent of Euro-sceptic rhetoric at the end of the twentieth century. You can almost imagine modern politicians, like Thornton, quoting Cromwell with approval because he refused to speak to the French ambassador in French. To do otherwise would have introduced ‘a conformity to their slavish constitution and modes of government,’ said Thornton proudly.

  By the second reading of the bill, he had a sizeable following cheering him on, as he imagined ‘constables’ visiting homes to write down people’s age and gender, checking that when the form said ‘women’, they were actually proved to be women. You can imagine the shiver of horror down the backs of the crusty old MPs. ‘We are to entrust petty tyrants with the power of oppression, in confidence that this power shall not be executed; to subject every house to a search; to register every name, age, sex, and state, upon oath; record the pox as a national distemper, and spend annually £50,000 of the public money – for what? To decide a wager at White’s!’

  Then as you read through his speeches in a dusty old tome edited by William Cobbett half a century later, there suddenly seems to be some sense in what he says. How can counting the population stop people leaving for America, as contemporaries were afraid they were doing? Why should press gangs create armies when volunteers would surely fight better? It was true when he said it, just as it is now. There is a long and noble tradition in Britain of suspicion of official interference, though it is constantly dragged out through history to justify the completely indefensible.

  Consequently, the nation did not get its first census for nearly another half-century, by which time the argument about population had become even more pessimistic – but for the opposite reason. Under the influence of the Benthamite clergyman Thomas Malthus, public opinion was afraid that the working population was increasing very much faster than the available food. Now the fear was that there were too many people, but there was still no adequate way of finding out what the population was.

  Malthus’ solution was pure New Labour. Mothers should be told that, after a certain date, no new children would be given welfare. Clergymen should explain to couples what a bad idea it was to marry recklessly. And there should be a national system of education set up, along with a national system of savings banks. There are 20,000 Londoners, said Malthus, plucking another unsupported statistic from the air, who get up every morning without knowing how they will pay for their meals.

  History hasn’t been kind to Malthus. Cobbett ridiculed him as ‘Parson Malthus’ and neither his solution nor his nightmare ever came to pass. But the figures which he and Bentham had called for finally began to arrive at the turn of the century. The Napoleonic Wars meant that the government simply had to know what the food requirements of the nation were for the year ahead. The legislation for the first national census was drawn up by Bentham’s step-brother Charles Abbott, the MP for Helston in Cornwall, and was rushed through parliament on New Year’s Eve 1800. Three months later, a muddled and inaccurate census counted 9.168 million people living in England and Wales.

  By
the 1840s, official figures covered criminal statistics, hospitals, how much money was taken from drunks in cities, how many pubs had billiard tables and how many people were ‘destitute of spiritual belief’. The new registers of births, marriages and deaths were immediately controversial. The Archbishop of Canterbury thundered against anything ‘required to gratify the statistical fancies of some few philosophers’. The Times weighed in to support the wife of a Leicestershire labourer who refused to give details of her new baby to the local registrar, talking of the new figures as a ‘tyranny leading to the violation of the decencies of domestic life’. She was found guilty but not punished.

  Counting births also annoyed the Church of England, which was afraid that it would undermine the old idea of simply counting baptisms. Anything else threatened to put the nonconformists on an equal level with the established church. Counting deaths annoyed the Utilitarians. Of course, it was all very well knowing how many people had died, but little use if you didn’t know why. And it was this issue which engaged the man who was probably the most influential counter of all, Edwin Chadwick. It was he who persuaded the government to get a question marked ‘cause of death’ included on the registration form.

  Chadwick was then 36 and approaching the height of his powers. He had already made himself the mainstay of two vital royal commissions, and their hefty reports, each one packed with tables of figures, were largely his work. It was Chadwick’s assistants who were being sent out across the country to count and collect not just numbers, but numbers that would create change. Not just statistics, but what Chadwick called ‘moral statistics’. Chadwick was not just the first modern civil servant, he was also a pioneer of modern campaigning.