The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  The problem for the self-esteemers is that they all suffer from the same very practical problem: how do you convince a world obsessed with measurements that you are right? ‘If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t count,’ said the economist John Kenneth Galbraith. It remains a problem, and it means that exponents of self-esteem as a basis for measuring the success of institutions will have to rely on convincing the world via gut feeling and shock value.

  The reaction to media appearances on the subject by Susie Orbach herself was more convincing than any facts she brought to bear. No media interview with her can go by without reference to her authorship of Fat is a Feminist Issue, or the fact that she was Princess Diana’s therapist. Having got past that – and putting the case for emotional literacy on a BBC panel discussion in 1996 – she was greeted by an assortment of columnists and politicians who reacted with a sniggering mixture of cynicism and alarm. ‘We don’t want to encourage people to let everything “hang out”!’ said a Conservative former Home Secretary. You could almost hear his little shiver of revulsion. Somehow his reaction and her insistence that they were aiming for exactly the reverse was a better confirmation of her arguments than anything else she could have said.

  But the message does seem to be getting through, despite the impossibility of measuring emotional literacy directly. Business is showing more interest than any other sector in the idea, and this is no coincidence. Nor is it just that Vasconcellos happens to represent the new emerging information economy from Silicon Valley, paying a critical role swinging them behind Bill Clinton in his original bid for the presidency in 1992. Because if politicians still insist on measuring school pupils in a one-dimensional way, then employers are increasingly looking for people a little bit broader.

  They are learning that happy well-balanced staff are more productive. According to one study of UK manufacturing companies in 1999, in fact, corporate culture can make between 10 and 29 per cent difference in profits. Another study in Bell Laboratories in Princeton showed that their star performers were not those with the highest IQs but those with the most successful interpersonal strategies. That’s the attraction of employing more women and it’s why businesses are urgently researching how to build trust.

  The full flowering of this idea is appearing – rather shockingly in its surprise value – in the courses run in American corporations by the British poet David Whyte. ‘Continually calling on its managers for more creativity, dedication, and adaptability, the American corporate world is tiptoeing for the first time in its short history into the very place from whence that dedication, creativity, and adaptability must come: the turbulent place where the soul of an individual is formed and finds expression,’ says Whyte in his book The Heart Aroused – with the tremendous sub-title Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America. ‘The sound and the fury of an individual’s creative life are the elemental waters missing from the dehydrated workday.’

  Poetry at work, art in prisons, stories in the surgery, they are all an alternative approach to the dry analysis of numbers. Their advocates say: ‘Forget the numbers for a minute. How do we inject humanity and life back into this situation?’ Their answers are intuitive, disturbing sometimes, and impossible to measure directly. They tend to exalt creativity as a way of liberating the best in people. They are what would, in other circles, be called ‘holistic’. Everything they stand for rejects the idea of chopping problems up into neat pieces, measuring them and puzzling out what affects what.

  VI

  Blundering around in the fog while on holiday near the Santa Lucia Mountains in California in the early 1960s, the psychologist Abraham Maslow stumbled upon the retreat centre where, a decade later, Vasconcellos would bring the battling legislators from Sacramento for a naked soak in the hot springs. The Esalen Institute was then attracting theologians like Paul Tillich, therapists like Carl Rogers and mystics like Carlos Castaneda and was fast becoming one of the founding influences on the Summer of Love and the New Age movement.

  It was an argument over Maslow that caused Vasconcellos and the new Governor Reagan to fall out over dinner the first time they met. And it was Maslow’s relationship with Esalen Institute, before he died in 1970, that popularized his so-called Hierarchy of Needs – now the basis of a great deal of modern marketing. He argued that you can’t just measure people’s needs and desires – they have lots of different ones. They start with food and clothing, and then when those are satisfied, they move up the hierarchy to shelter. Then to needs like keeping up with the Joneses, and beyond that to some of the sophisticated consumers of today, in control of their needs for the lower steps of the ladder, who want fitness, education, self-improvement. Different aspects of their personality need different things at different times of their lives. There’s no bottom line.

  There’s no bottom line with intelligence either, because there is more than one kind – the great discovery of the visionary educationalist Howard Gardner, whose 1983 book Frames of Mind pointed out something which now seems obvious. Measuring people’s intelligence by IQ alone means almost nothing unless you measure their other kinds of intelligence too, and educate them to get what they need at different levels of Maslow’s hierarchy.

  The controversy over IQ has been raging for most of the past century, and in some ways it prefigured more recent versions of the same issue – that one number can’t possibly measure the success of companies, nations or cities in any meaningful way. But IQ has a darker side which the other arguments don’t share, catalogued in Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man, because of the way the figures are used, as if it measured something fixed and unchangeable about people. As if IQ (which originally included questions about baseball players to people who spoke no English) could be used to rank classes or races. As if it could somehow measure ‘worth’: ‘This will ultimately result in curtailing the reproduction of feeble-mindedness and in the elimination of an enormous amount of crime, pauperism and industrial inefficiency,’ wrote Lewis Terman chillingly. Terman tested every US army recruit in the First World War, and went on to try measuring the IQ of long-dead scientists and artists by analysing the length of their entries in encyclopaedias.

  The problem about IQ as a way of testing pupils is that it is supposed to be a fixed evaluation of their abilities. It doesn’t tell teachers anything about what they can do to help the child. And it explains nothing about how it is often the children with high IQs who go to pieces, join mind-bending cults or hang themselves in their bedrooms. And it says absolutely nothing about emotions and the ability to handle them and use them. If Erasmus was right in his medieval calculation that the ratio of emotion to reason is 24 to one (though that’s not something you can measure either) it makes some kind of emotional education all the more vital.

  ‘We have gone too far in emphasizing the value and import of the purely rational, of what IQ measures, in human life,’ wrote Daniel Goleman. ‘Intelligence can come to nothing when emotions hold sway.’ Whatever Jeremy Bentham and Sherlock Holmes might have thought, the mind doesn’t work at its best without being able to understand, filter and use emotions.

  But even if the narrowness of schooling isn’t very important in itself, there seems to be a good business reason for letting IQ quietly drop. Narrow measures of people aren’t very useful any more. They never gave a very good picture, but the new economy has no place for people educated to sift facts and figures and nothing else. It needs imagination, empathy, creativity and the ability to work in groups. It doesn’t need one-dimensional machines. And it certainly doesn’t need narrow psychological or educational measurements, cooked up in a laboratory, which reduce real life to one irrelevant dimension.

  Self-esteem, emotional intelligence, emotional literacy are all ways of measuring the success of schools, which don’t reduce human individuals, and which can inject life, spirit and significance back into the business of education – and medicine too. They are all symptoms of a shift away from too many numbers, wh
ich amount to the first glimmerings of a new kind of ideology. The danger is that, once the number-crunchers get their hands on them, they are reduced again to technocratic and simplistic measures that leave the basic problems untouched. We can’t escape from the basic problem, however much we might want to. There’s no two ways about it: the best recruitment policy focuses on individual jobs and individual applicants. The best education policy focuses on each pupil individually. This may not be achievable in the short-term, but it will always be true.

  The idea of tailoring education policy to every pupil seems like a revolutionary idea, but something similar has been going on in business for years with the idea of what business guru Martha Rogers first called ‘mass customization’ – that companies can customize products for each individual customer. Businesses are telling customers – as they say on the Levi-Strauss website: ‘There’s only one rule. Be original. Other than that, just be your self. Hopefully you’re both.’ Wouldn’t it be so much more effective if school or prison management could give up all these aggregated numbers and do the same?

  In the meantime, ideas like self-esteem have managed to escape from the old closed-minded ideologies of the past, which forced the facts to fit the frame, providing a structure which brings common sense to bear on the dead world of figures, so we can see patterns again. We may not be able to measure trust – or feelgood, or self-esteem – but we know what it is when we see it. That requires human institutions that make people happy in the round, and humans to run them. It doesn’t need schools like factories that define learning in such a narrow way that it is sucked dry of all joy.

  You can’t measure these human attributes directly, but that doesn’t mean they’re not important. Quite the reverse: they are a different kind of bottom line altogether – one which doesn’t reduce people or squeeze the truth. Or as Vasconcellos puts it: ‘We are the bottom line.’

  Bizarre measurement No. 6

  Cran

  (A British unit of measurement for fresh herrings. 1 cran = 37.5 gallons of fish.)

  * * *

  Cost of an online marriage on internetmarriage.com: $24.45 (an online divorce costs $8.15)

  Number of times people have sex around the world every day: 120 million

  Chapter 6

  Historical Interlude 3: Social Copernicus

  Things hang together in a perplexing tangle of causation beyond the possibility of unravelment. The moral question rests at the bottom. On it rests the economic; and on both is built up the standard of life and habit. Then all act and react on each other; and to be attacked, must be attacked together.

  Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the People of London, Vol 16

  The sign of a truly educated man is to be deeply moved by statistics. George Bernard Shaw

  I

  It was an age where there was barely a Victorian who did not conceal about their person a microscope, butterfly net or measuring tape. And none more enthusiastically than the Bristol doctor John Beddoe, whose life’s mission – begun while filling in the long periods between patients at his sparsely-attended practice – was to measure everyone’s head. It was Beddoe’s self-appointed task to track down the old ‘races’ of Britain, the Vikings, Belgae, Celts, defining their hair and eye colour and facial features and head shape, all marked down on little cards which Beddoe carried with him everywhere.

  He began his method on a trip to the Orkneys in 1853 and his work culminated in the publication of The Races of Britain, involving 300 volunteers out measuring heads around the country on his behalf. But this was a peculiar example of the difficulties of relying too much on measuring. What do you say to a stranger before ‘hold still while I just whip out my measuring tape’? Beddoe solved the problem in particularly disreputable pubs by starting arguments about who had the biggest head. The betting would become so heated that Beddoe would normally have to step in to settle the matter, and to note down his precious data.

  The Victorians were obsessed with the size of people’s heads, driven by the thrill of phrenology, beginning with Franz-Joseph Gall in 1825 – the idea that bumps on the skull corresponded with aptitudes. Coachloads of scientists left their heads to science, so they could be measured and compared, including Gall, whose brain turned out to be considerably smaller than his contemporaries’. As, incidentally, was Einstein’s: brain size is another measurement that misses the point.

  For most of Queen Victoria’s reign, the nation was swept by crazes for measuring and collecting. After the publication of G. W. Francis’ An Analysis of British Ferns and their Allies (1837), everyone was out collecting ferns. Or flowers after Handbook of British Flora was published in 1858 by George Bentham (Jeremy’s nephew). Or insects after Ants, Bees and Wasps (1874) by the banker and popular scientist Sir John Lubbock – a man so impatient to get to his work table in the mornings that he invented himself a pair of elastic-sided boots. Whole coastlines were stripped of their wild flowers by marauding collectors. Whole nations of butterflies were pinned in glass cases, whole ants’ nests transported to glass formicariums on green leather desks.

  It was the great age of the amateur naturalist, coming to terms with the meaning of natural history by counting and measuring, like trainspotters trying to imbibe the meaning of railways by noting down the number of wheels in their notebooks. At the same time, scientists were pushing out the boundaries of numbers. People like Edward Stanley, counting the prayer books, literacy and religious attendance of his long-suffering tenants in Alderley. Or like Darwin’s nephew Francis Galton as he battled for his new ‘scientific priesthood’. Galton invented a series of hidden machines that could measure the dullness of meetings, by measuring the number of times a person fidgets.

  And while the natural historians were busy counting species, their counterparts were busy doing the same process in Africa, mapping new geographies, measuring new rivers or – like the explorer John Speke on his 1860 expedition – measuring the precise size of the gigantic wives of the Ugandan king of Karagwe, who were too fat to stand upright.

  It was the days of ‘darkest Africa’, or ‘Dr Livingstone I presume’ and the Gatling gun, and in the middle of all this, a new vista of measuring opened up under the very noses of the Victorians. ‘As there is a darkest Africa, so also is there a darkest England,’ said the founder of the Salvation Army, ‘General’ William Booth. ‘With ease and celerity, could you send me to Darkest Africa or Innermost Tibet,’ the writer Jack London told Thomas Cook in his best journalistic rhetoric. ‘But to the East End of London, barely a stone’s throw distant from Ludgate Circus, you know not the way!’

  Then, as now, official figures left out the answers which many people really wanted to know about their cities, and the lack of knowledge grew to forbidding proportions. How many prostitutes were there in London, for example? Henry Mayhew, the great observer of London life, estimated it at 80,000. The Lancet in 1857 came up with a figure of one woman in 16, and one house in 60. Nobody knew. But towards the end of the century, the answers to this and many other questions about London were suddenly answered. And all because of a shipowner called Charles Booth.

  In 17 volumes of detailed research, it was Booth who set about mapping what he called the ‘terra incognita’ of London, working far into the night for 17 years in the belief that the structures of society were unravelling under the threat of social unrest. He counted poverty, jobs, books, bibles, pigeon-fanciers, morality – building up as complete a picture of London as ever has been produced. It was Booth who, with his small white beard and elongated body, wandered around every street in London in his homburg hat, as the contradictions about his life and role grew ever sharper. A conservative who laid the foundations of the Welfare State and old age pensions. A ‘reverent unbeliever’ who devoted years to the study of religious life. A number-cruncher with a deep and growing suspicion that counting was not providing him with the answers he needed.

  II

  How did a shipping magnate end up tramping the streets of L
ondon measuring poverty and pioneering sociology? It’s an unusual shift, and not explained by a major change of direction, by war, politics or bankruptcy. It isn’t the kind of thing you expect of captains of industry today, any more than you did in the 1880s when Booth was setting out – for a bet as much as for anything else – on his gigantic counting exercise. But probably the clues to his unusual life are in Liverpool, where he was born on 30 March 1840 at 27 Bedford Street, a terraced house with a garden at the back, near where the Anglican cathedral is now. Like Bentham and Chadwick, his mother died when he was young. Charles left school at 16 – his years of education seemed mainly to consist of doing drill in the police shed – and began work as an apprentice to the shipping firm Lamport & Holt.

  He was soon running his own fur-trading business with his brother Alfred. Standing in front of a map of the world with his sister’s in-laws, the Holts, Charles regarded the atlas like a medieval Pope dividing the globe. Don’t go east, said Alfred Holt, because our shipping line is operating there. Go west from New York and we’ll help all we can. With a new mania for figures, Charles went back to New York demanding that his brother send more and more facts about existing services between New York, Central America and the West Indies. He devised a way of summing up any given business situation in figures and, by 1865, had decided to invest the whole of their family capital into two new ships to service the ports of Para, Maranhem and Ceara in South America.