The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  He was increasingly influential. Seebohm Rowntree was confirming his figures in his detailed surveys of York and other researchers were copying his methods, but as the century ground towards its close, Booth was increasingly aware of the limitations of numbers. He felt as far away as ever from the truth of what was really important – the interplay of forces between good and evil. So he embarked on the third and final phase of his study, to uncover the moral and religious influences in London.

  But measuring people’s religion and morals was far more difficult, so for his latest project he would rely more on personal observation. This time, he would put aside numbers altogether. Enthusiastically, he wrote to the leaders of all the church denominations asking for their help. He had assistants set about interviewing every clergyman and social agency in London. The office piled up with pamphlets, annual reports, leaflets and parish magazines. Sunday after Sunday he spent in different churches, staying just long enough to get the feel of the proceedings then moving on to the next. For the rest of the week he would walk with the local police down every street. Then he would take the data back to the office and transfer it to colour codes on the wall map – scarlet for places of worship, black for pubs and places selling booze, blue for schools.

  The problem was the usual one: cause and effect. Just because people went to church, did that make them better people? You could count until you were blue in the face, and still not work that out. ‘Spiritual influences do not lend themselves readily to statistical treatment, and we have not attempted it,’ he wrote in the first volume. ‘The subject is one in which figures may easily be pressed too far and if trusted too much are likely to be more than usually dangerous. Our object, rather, has been to obtain truthful and trustworthy impressions.’ How right he was.

  But there was resistance to this kind of in-depth counting. The 1,800 religious interviews they carried out might take two and a half hours each or more. Some people were afraid his assistants would give their findings to the fearsome General Booth of the Salvation Army. Some just didn’t like this kind of thing. ‘Dear Sir,’ wrote the Vicar of St Paul’s, Herne Hill. ‘As you have the consent of the Bishop of Rochester and Southwark I suppose I must consent to see your representative … But I am weary and sick of the incessant “numbering of the people” for one cause or another.’ Thank goodness the poor man wasn’t around a century later.

  Booth’s impressions were explosive. The advent of universal schooling seemed to have had a good effect on crime and on the relationship between pupils and teachers – teachers were no longer stoned by children in the street. Booth reported: ‘The day was (says an old resident) when no cat would appear in the streets of Bethnal Green without being hunted and maltreated; now such conduct is rare.’

  But otherwise the findings were a terrible slap in the face for the churches. He recognized that there were individual priests and ministers doing good work, but they were few and far between. Most mission work he described as having ‘the character of galvanized activity without one spark of vitality’. And he reserved his special contempt for the Salvation Army, describing their threat of hellfire to the poor as ‘the most awful example of theological savagery’.

  He approved of the Quakers, Unitarians and Congregationalists for their social concerns and clear ethical demands. He disapproved of the Methodists and Baptists and evangelical missionaries: ‘The admixture of Gospel and giving produces an atmosphere of meanness and hypocrisy, and brings discredit on both charity and religion,’ he wrote. He found himself cheering on one needy old lady who steadfastly refused the Salvation Army’s demands that she should ‘turn to Christ’. ‘I think she derived moral support from our presence,’ he said, with evident relish.

  He was already sceptical about organized religion by then, but he also found no evidence that it was helping improve people’s condition – except as far as the people doing the charity work benefited. Christianity went with income tax, he said. If you were too poor to pay it, you seemed to be beyond the reach of any denomination. ‘I try to do two things,’ the Vicar of St Stephen’s, North Bow told them: ‘To teach men to fear God and honour the King. If I succeed in that, I don’t think I can go far wrong’.

  Very few people went to church, about 6 per cent in Hackney and 2 per cent in Hackney Wick, not so different from today. The Vicar of Camberwell explained that he divided his parishioners into three: ‘(1) The common or garden materialist (the great majority). On Sunday morning he copulates about ten times with his wife and reads The Referee. (2) The Superstitious who turn to Ritualism, and (3) The Devout, who in nine cases out of ten go to chapel.’ Again, it’s not so different a century later.

  By the end of the religious series of volumes, his readers held their breaths, but Booth was as confused as ever. We need a prescription, said the younger sociologists. Hard at work in the Fabian Society, Beatrice Webb (as intense and as miserable as ever) was finally rejecting Booth’s approach. Did Booth just want more and more facts, she and her associates asked? Why would he not just make up his mind? He decided on one last volume to pull the strands together, and it was eagerly awaited for the answers it might contain. But by the end of it, everything seemed to have been defined as consequences. There seemed no bright shining cause to blame and tackle. It was all effect.

  ‘The dry bones that lie scattered over the long valley that we have traversed together lie before my reader,’ he wrote in the final paragraph of the seventeenth and final volume, with a self-deprecating air of exhaustion. ‘May some great soul, master of a subtler and nobler alchemy than mine, disentangle the confused issues, reconcile the apparent contradictions in aim, melt and commingle the various influences for good into one divine uniformity of effort, and make these dry bones live, so the streets of Jerusalem may sing with joy.’

  When the volume was published, he was 1,000 miles up the Amazon opening the port of Manaus, so he couldn’t hear either the singing or the sighs of disappointment.

  V

  Charles Booth had a physical breakdown two years after he finished the final volume in 1903, finding himself immediately afterwards a privy councillor and a member of the government’s Tariff Commission. Yet he had come to one conclusion at least. He was convinced of the need for old age pensions, five shillings a week from the age of 65.

  The figures seemed unambiguous. In Stepney, 32.8 per cent of the poverty was caused by simple old age. He raged against forcing old people into workhouses, envisaging a time when ‘they can still remain members of the society to which they are accustomed, can still offer as well as receive neighbourly favours, mind a baby, sit up with a stick, chop firewood, or weed the garden. They are not cut off from the sympathies of daily existence, and their presence is often a valuable ingredient in the surrounding life.’

  When he told the Royal Statistical Society his ideas in 1891, there was complete silence, and then so many people wanted to condemn him that they had to adjourn the meeting to another day. At the hostile follow-up in December that year, thick London fog came into the room and it was impossible to see who was speaking. ‘Voice after voice emerged,’ wrote Mary. ‘All unfavourable, many whilst courteous almost contemptuous in their repudiation of so wild a project.’ The massively influential Charity Organisation Society – Booth’s sworn enemies for their patronizing philanthropy – called it the ‘most outrageous and absurd scheme yet promulgated’. Yet his ideas were incorporated into the 1908 Pensions Act by the new Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George only 15 years later.

  In the period between, and despite his health, he was appointed to the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws, and found himself once again sitting next to Beatrice Webb. But this was a different Beatrice to the woman he had collaborated with nearly 20 years before. Sidney had taken over a bunch of cranks called the Fellowship of the New Life and turned them into the Fabian Society, and together with people like George Bernard Shaw – and soon H. G. Wells – they were transforming it into a force which would mo
uld the twentieth century. Beatrice had none of Booth’s growing doubts. She and Sidney had also rejected his individualism, but they had embraced the idea of counting with missionary zeal. It was a fatal mixture.

  The obsession with facts led to the foundation of the London School of Economics in 1895, and their own ten volumes of work on English local government – their major works alone amounted to five million words. It led Sidney into the cabinet in two governments and it led both finally to burial in Westminster Abbey. It was no coincidence that Sidney Webb had been the son of a radical accountant. But their collectivism also led them to a snobbish rejection of people – ‘the middle class are materialistic, and the working class stupid, and in large sections sottish, with no interest except in racing odds,’ wrote Beatrice in 1900. It led to the Labour Party’s traditional determination to cling to central power – to high-rise flats, block votes and all the other abominations of state socialism. It led them to a fatal admiration for Soviet collectivization, defending Stalin at the height of his tyranny. ‘They regarded the function of a statesman to bamboozle or terrorize the populace,’ wrote Bertrand Russell about them. Their drab influence can still be discerned today – the very perversion of Bentham’s ideals, yet founded on everything he wrote.

  It was not a combination designed to appeal to Booth, who urged the Royal Commission to return to the principles of Chadwick’s 1834 Poor Laws. He wanted the Commission to ‘interfere’ in the lives of his poverty-stricken class B – assuming that class A would then disappear of its own accord – so that the other classes could be left as free as possible. He called this ‘limited socialism’; the Webbs wanted no limits. The petty intrigues among his fellow members infuriated him. He infuriated them by interviewing witnesses in intricate detail for five hours at a stretch, as if he was still doing his survey. In 1908, he went home in disgust and exhaustion.

  By the end, Beatrice had organized an influential minority report – calling for state child care, labour exchanges, land reclamation and a national heath service, much of which came to pass – and a permanent Royal Commission Office to collect facts, which didn’t. Booth refused to sign either report, and published his own evidence which described welfare payments as ‘a perfect hotbed of deceit’. It was his last intervention in public life. He died at Gracedieu on 16 November 1916, three blood-soaked days before the official end of the Battle of the Somme.

  It was a different world by then and Booth had been brushed aside by the twentieth century, rejected as old-fashioned and too much of a number-cruncher to change the world. But looked at almost a century later, he seems a much more modern figure than the authoritarian Fabians. He may have been paralysed by the contradictions in his own figures, but he was also too humane to draw conclusions which did not do justice to the fine mesh of individual differences. He could see the paradoxes in the poverty statistics. He could see they failed to communicate the whole truth about poverty. ‘Their lives are an unending struggle and lack comfort,’ he wrote about the poor he knew. ‘But I do not know that they lack happiness.’

  But at the time, he seemed inexplicably conservative in his indecision. ‘To action I have never pretended and any claim on abstract thought I abandoned as a childish delusion,’ he wrote sadly to Beatrice. ‘So nothing is left for me but investigation.’ He had no stomach for the new world.

  The Fabian rhetoric, on the other hand, was depressingly simplistic. Individuals didn’t count, but money did. ‘The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization,’ wrote Shaw in the preface to his play Major Barbara, the year Booth joined the Royal Commission. ‘It represents health, strength, honour, generosity, as conspicuously and undeniably as the want of it represents illness, weakness, disgrace, meanness and ugliness.’

  This kind of simple counting squeezes out individual differences, along with life, love and significance. It implies a narrow view of equality and the human spirit. Booth replied with what is an absolutely classic critique of counting. It is the perfect answer to Bentham:

  It is difficult for those whose daily experience or imagination brings vividly before them the trials and sorrows of individual lives, to think in terms of percentages rather than numbers. They refused to set off and balance the happy hours of the same class, or even of the same people, against those miseries; much less can they consent to bring the lot of other classes into the account, add up the opposing figures, and contentedly carry forward a credit balance. In the arithmetic of woe they can only add or multiply, they cannot subtract or divide. In intensity of feeling such as this, and not in statistics, lies the power to move the world.

  Bizarre measurement No. 7

  Skot

  (Unit of light, used in Germany during the Second World War to measure how much light people were showing through their blackout.)

  * * *

  Time that UK parents spend driving children to school: 1 million hours a year

  Proportion of British males who believe in aliens: 58 per cent

  Chapter 7

  The New Auditors

  Grown-ups love figures. When you tell them that you’ve made a new friend, they never ask you any questions about essential matters. They never say to you ‘What does his voice sound like? What games does he love best? Does he collect butterflies?’ Instead they demand ‘How old is he? How much does he weigh? How much money does his father make?’ Only from these figures do they think they have learned anything about him.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

  First comes fodder, then comes morality.

  Bertolt Brecht

  I

  If football is the new rock ‘n’ roll, as they say, then information is the new money. Torrents of it flow across the world’s computer screens every day. Information about value, facts, measurements, indices, all of it twitching the massive markets. It’s information, rather than money, that makes the world go round and which lies behind the gigantic instantaneous fortunes of the Internet billionaires. That means global information flow can be particularly valuable.

  The story goes back to 1959, which is when management guru Peter Drucker published his book Landmarks of Tomorrow. In it, he coined the powerful phrase ‘knowledge workers’ to describe the footloose, innovating people whose business is the manipulation of information or the creation of world-beating ideas. It is strange to think that within those four decades since Drucker’s prediction, ‘knowledge workers’ have already come to make up over a third of the whole US workforce.

  Drucker later described how one of the largest US defence contractors did a survey in the 1980s to find out what kind of information was needed to do the job effectively. ‘The search for answers soon revealed that whole layers of management – perhaps as many as six out of a total of fourteen – existed only because these questions had not been asked before,’ he wrote. ‘The company had data galore. It had always used its copious data for control rather than for information.’

  It was a familiar pattern and it still is, because information and knowledge mean different things. You can have too much information. But apart from the US futurists who think our brains are about to explode with future shock, you can’t possibly have too much knowledge.

  There’s another difference too. You can put information into figures, tables and graphs, but you can’t necessarily do the same with knowledge. So most organizations and bureaucracies very much prefer the first kind. They call it ‘data’. The other kinds of knowledge, often simply the kind of informal know-how which people exchange over coffee or a cigarette – but equally important to the bottom line – often gets ignored because it can’t be measured. Often the people who hold it are first in the queue for downsizing.

  A new fascination for measuring ‘knowledge’ and ‘learning’ is the latest in a century-long struggle by business to isolate what makes them successful in terms of figures. The pioneering time and motion studies in the early twentieth century measured efficiency, realizing how much know-how coul
d improve the profitability of a factory. Armed with his stopwatch and clipboard, Frederick Taylor measured every movement and gesture on the assembly line, but he missed out a key asset. The time and motion experts had no interest at all in the knowledge, wisdom and skill locked up in the heads of their human cogs. Only in the knowledge of the men in white coats.

  Half a century later, it was the advent of Total Quality Management, an attempt to measure quality by the American business guru W. Edwards Deming, which launched the modern business dash to measure the unmeasurable. Deming was also one of the first of what became a herd of trampling American management gurus, but in those days he was ignored by his compatriots. Only the Japanese took any notice.

  ‘Why is it that productivity increases as quality improves?’ he asked on the first page of his book Out of the Crisis. It is hard to remember that, until recently, most Western companies were obsessed with how much it might cost to make sure their services and products were good enough – an affliction shared by most British governments to this day. They were afraid that too much effort put into improving quality would cut their profits. They ignored Deming’s answers to his own question, which were: ‘less rework’ and ‘not so much waste’. Yet the Japanese businesses which adopted them found that, just by counting these things differently, a whole world of greater profitability opened up.

  His idea took flight after Japanese engineers studied the quality control literature from Bell Laboratories. Bell had seconded their engineers to General Douglas MacArthur’s staff occupying Japan. And by 1950, every top management meeting in Japan had this ‘less rework’ mantra up on the blackboard behind them. So when Deming went out there the following year to give a lecture tour on his statistics, they were so pleased to see him, they created the Deming Award in his honour. It soon became the most coveted industrial prize in Japan.