The Tyranny of Numbers

by David Boyle

  It depends how you work it out, of course. Especially when you start counting crime – because people’s fears often bear no relation to reality. Two thirds of shoppers from Leicester interviewed in the 1990s revealed that what scared them most was being killed by a terrorist bomb – which even then was pretty unlikely. Go to any city in the world, however safe, and the locals will tell you how careful you have to be. Even if you use the same measuring rod everywhere, local people perceive it differently, define it differently and interpret it differently. Quality of life measures may be better than simply measuring the amount of money changing hands – but they are not exactly definitive.

  This same argument was being played out in a series of angry battles behind the scenes at the United Nations. The Chapter 40 of Agenda 21, agreed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, had committed all the signatories to measure progress towards sustainable development, using a series of what they called ‘indicators’ of success. By 1995, they had come up with a working list of 134 of them they hoped all countries would adopt. The trouble was they all chose different ones. They collected data in different ways. They didn’t want to subject themselves to some of the indicators – and some of them meant different things in different cultures.

  But what should they measure? And who should decide? Would it just be the powerful Western countries all over again? What if one country wanted to measure its success by how energy-efficient they were, but another wanted to measure the progress by health statistics? The OPEC countries fought the environmentalists. The old-style statisticians who wanted scientific indicators fought the new sustainability professionals who wanted thrilling ones. The developing countries fought the developed. There was only one way forward – to let nations and communities choose their own measurements.

  It was an important decision, and one of the first to put it into effect – in nearly every district – has been the UK. And so, 160 years since Chadwick sent his assistant commissioners scouring the cities with their measurements and tabular data, their great-great-great-grandchildren set out again – this time by faster modes of transport than the post-chaise – to measure the unmeasurable.

  IV

  The early twenty-first century looks set to be dominated by the thousand miles or so of the North American Pacific coast. Not so much because of the Hollywood dream machine or the Los Angeles smog, but because of the extraordinary outpouring of wealth and creativity associated with Silicon Valley. So it is no surprise that a book about measuring what is really important should keep coming back there. There was John Vasconcellos, Silicon Valley’s representative in the California assembly. There was Ted Halstead, founder of the Redefining Progress and now head of the Silicon Valley’s own think tank, the New America Foundation. There was the challenge to accountancy posed by measuring the value of companies like Microsoft.

  The next part of the measuring story starts in Microsoft’s home town of Seattle, just up the Pacific coast, and also home to coffee bars, Boeing and the good life. Gary Lawrence had been city administrator for Redmond, where Microsoft’s headquarters is, before he was head-hunted to be planning director of Seattle – after a nationwide search for a new kind of planner.

  The task was to create a plan for Seattle that would cover every neighbourhood, would reflect what people actually wanted, and would not just cover issues like where the shops should be – but health and education too. But since this was in the first flush of excitement after the Rio summit, the new Seattle plan would also measure progress against yardsticks set by the people who lived there. This was a system devised and promoted by the local group Sustainable Seattle, and it has spread all over the world.

  It was a tough job and it was going to take years. The mayor was given his own weekly TV show where people were encouraged to phone in with suggestions and views. He and Gary Lawrence appeared on talk radio five times a week – this is after all the city of Frasier. Full colour brochures were delivered to every household; teenagers were hired by the city to translate the issues into language that other teenagers might understand. Lawrence himself did 400 presentations over two years. It was a gigantic exercise in local democracy.

  Human cussedness being what it is – by the end of this unprecedented consultation, a third of the city had still never heard of the project. Worse, many of those that had heard of it said they hadn’t been consulted enough. But they overwhelmingly supported the direction the plan was going.

  Then there was the job of choosing their indicators of success, along the lines set out by Jacksonville in Florida, with help from Hazel Henderson. Seattle rejected conventional money measurements. They wanted to know how cultured, how educated and how clean the city was. They wanted to measure their success by the number of books sold or lent out by libraries, by attendance at arts events, by participation in sport. They set out to measure the number of latchkey kids, the amount of blood donated, the number of hours people volunteered. They also wanted a series of ratios. They wanted to judge the city’s success by the number of vegetarian restaurants as a proportion of the number of McDonald’s. Or the amount of bird seed sold at local garden centres as a proportion of the pesticide. They wanted to know the number of therapists per head of population – though I’ve never been clear if it was considered a sign of mental health if there were more of them or less.

  That was 1993. Soon the same idea had spread to the UK, pioneered by the New Economics Foundation and UNED-UK, who set about encouraging a new generation of counters to get out there and measure. Once again, it was a question of how to measure what really matters. If you measure problems you just get depressed. If you measure particular solutions, they might be wrong – they often are. You might for example measure how close the shops or bus stops were to people’s homes – forgetting that the food could still be disgusting and the bus service scandalous.

  No, you had to find what was most important – and you had to make it inspiring. ‘Few people feel passionately about spreadsheets,’ said Gary Lawrence. ‘For indicators to lead to change, there needs to be emotional content: people need to care in their hearts as well as their minds.’

  It was a revolutionary and enjoyably unscientific idea, and it led to the idea of ‘hot indicators’. Hot indicators might not have been measuring the most important aspect of life. They might not be exact or scientific, but at least they could catch people’s imagination. So Seattle now judges its success on the number of salmon in local streams. In Dundee it was the number of empty houses, and in Fife it was the number of fish landing at local ports. There was the amount of asthma in Leeds, the number of cars with only one occupant in Peter-borough, the amount of local produce sold in local shops in West Devon, the number of streets quiet enough to hold a conversation in in Hertfordshire, the number of swans in Norwich, the number of people who have planted a tree in Croxdale, the number of stag beetles in Colchester.

  Armed with their equivalent of tabular data, Chadwick’s successors stood at street corners collecting figures and bringing them back to the local council to collate. Sometimes it was local people doing the measuring, sometimes local officials, sometimes it was children. And as true followers of Chadwick, the main object of the exercise – beyond science or calculation – was to create change.

  Merton people insisted on measuring asthma cases, even though local doctors protested that it wasn’t very scientific. Oldham tried to develop an indicator of how beautiful new buildings were, but simply couldn’t work out how. Instead they chose to measure the number of local ponds with frogs or newts in. Perry Walker of the New Economics Foundation encouraged the idea because it was something schoolchildren could get involved in. ‘These are not scientific indicators,’ he said. ‘That’s not how they achieve their impact. They do so because they’re what people care about.’

  In another of his projects in Reading, people were puzzling over how they could measure the amount of dog mess in local parks in a way that could excite people. They hit on the idea of planting a little
flag by each small brown pile, and then taking a picture of it. There were 900 flags in all, and the pictures were published enthusiastically in the local paper. Two weeks later they did the same, and there were only 250 flags. Counting had worked. Perhaps it should be no surprise that Seattle now has the highest life expectancy in the USA and more books are bought there than in any other US city – you tend to get what you measure, after all.

  Alternative indicators were all the rage. The Canadian environmentalist William Rees has pioneered a method of counting the environmental impact of cities in terms of the hectares they need of the earth to satisfy their needs. The UN Human Development Index was ranking countries according to life expectancy, education and purchasing power. The World Bank was working on its improved ‘Wealth Accounting System’ that included environment and human measurements. Even Standard & Poor, the American financial touchstone, were rating municipal bonds according the quality of life of the city that issued them. And right at the end of the millennium, Hazel Henderson’s Calvert-Henderson Quality of Life Indicators – measuring each country by a series of different measures of their environment, health, safety, human rights and much else besides – were being sent out to 1,500 ethical investment brokers instead of their usual Christmas cake.

  V

  So there they are, Bentham’s new generation of counters around the world – peering through the smog in South American cities counting the number of days you can see the Andes. Or scouring the streets of Britain measuring how many people can name their community police. The whole business of indicators began as a radical challenge to governments. One group called Green Gauge even bought the poster site opposite the hideous headquarters of the Department of the Environment in London, and covered it with their own pollution and traffic measurements. But now everyone is doing it. As early as 1991, the Canadian government was measuring its success with 43 new indicators. The OECD was soon counting 150 indicators. A 1993 survey of England and Wales found that 84 per cent of people wanted more environmental information from the government. And heavens – did they get it!

  The new-look Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions announced its thirteen ‘headline indicators’ in 1999, including the number of unfit homes, adult literacy and more amorphous concepts like community spirit. Behind those 13 was another set of 150 sub-indicators – and they just covered one government department. For some reason, the official mind believes that if indicators are a good idea then we should have too many of them. Soon every department of government was churning out figures of their own, each one backed by a battery of technicians and statisticians, publishing them all in screeds of tables. ‘Best value’ rules for British local authorities is unleashing a wave of local counting. At the last count, the British government had set itself a total of over 8,000 targets. Chadwick would have been proud.

  Why do indicators have such an appeal to modern governments? Partly because of the technocratic thrill of measuring the ebb and flow of cause and effect as if government was a gigantic, though not particularly well-oiled, machine. It is the McKinsey fallacy all over again. Yet cause and effect is the one thing it is quite impossible to measure – interpreting the burgeoning wealth of data to work out what causes what is always a matter of judgement, common sense and intuition.

  Yet governments still cling to their other dream – one number to sum up the whole caboodle. GNP and its partner GDP are alive and well. If you look up the policies of the new regional development agencies in the UK, you will see that many of them share the ambition to have the highest growth in Europe. When the Clinton administration tried to add footnotes to the GDP figures that measured the depletion of natural resources, the whole idea was blocked by two representatives from coal-producing states. If national accounts showed air pollution, warned Alan Mollohan from West Virginia, ‘somebody is going to say … that the coal industry isn’t contributing anything to the country’. Quite so.

  This fresh outbreak of measuring is one of the defining characteristics of our age. In politics the response to the wider counting crisis – that we need to measure what’s really important – is to measure everything. But these bizarre local indicators are different. They are not intended to measure the world, as much as change it. They are about inspiring people. It’s the act of measuring that matters. Change happens when children go out measuring stag beetles in their back garden. It probably doesn’t happen when the professionals do it with their precision and clever instruments. It happens when they ask people whether they feel well, but probably not when – as in Oldham – they measure the number of babies born less than the official healthy birthweight of precisely 2,499 grammes. This kind of measuring is more likely to suffer the same fate that most official counting suffers from. In alternative economic circles, it’s known as MEGO Syndrome. It stands for My Eyes Glaze Over.

  What we count is important because it reflects who we are. Or as Hazel Henderson told the first alternative economics summit in London in 1984, ‘reality is what we pay attention to’. That explains why Chadwick and his contemporaries spent so much time measuring people’s religious feelings and why our own contemporaries are measuring allergies. Strange in a way that both generations counted stag beetles in their back gardens.

  But it’s more than that. We construct our own reality by counting it. ‘Indicators only reflect our innermost core values and goals, measuring the development of our own understanding,’ says Henderson. No wonder when we measure what we fear the most – greenhouse gas or child abuse – the figures tend to get worse. At last, an explanation for the Quantum Effect.

  Or as one Washington policy-maker puts it at the foot of all her e-mails: ‘We are what we measure. It’s time we measured what we want to be.’

  Bizarre measurement No. 10

  Man hour

  (The amount of work done by the ‘standard’ man, as in ‘man year’ and ‘man day’. The unit is taken to include women, or so it’s said …)

  * * *

  Number of Americans shot by children under six (1983–93): 138, 490

  Number of food shops in Britain (1950): 221,662

  Number of food shops in Britain (1997): 36,931

  Chapter 10

  Historical Interlude 5: The Price of Everything

  If it cannot get beyond its vast abstractions, the national income, the rate of growth, capita/output ratio, input/output analysis, labour mobility, capital accumulation; if it cannot get beyond all this and make contact with the human realities of poverty, frustration, alienation, despair, breakdown, crime, escapism, stress, congestion, ugliness and spiritual death, then let us scrap economics and start afresh.

  E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful

  A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

  Oscar Wilde’s definition of a cynic

  I

  ‘A woman of uranium,’ said the French newspaper Le Quotidien about Margaret Thatcher. ‘Compared to her, how leaden appear most of our leaders.’ She may have glowed in the dark, but the great thing about having her as prime minister was that you knew where you stood. With her handbag in constant attendance – even in the kitchen, according to one fly-on-the wall documentary – she could be relied upon to be the Iron or Uranium Lady almost on demand. If it wasn’t the Soviets, it was the miners or the Greenham Women, the unemployed, the greens, the Militant Tendency, the ‘enemy within’. When it came to the environment, she prided herself as a chemist that she understood the problem – if indeed there was one – a good deal more than those lily-livered, bearded green types.

  Yet suddenly on 27 September 1988, and over nine years into her term of office, Mrs Thatcher seemed to turn the world on its head. In her speech to the Royal Society, she deliberately stole the mantle of one of the most famous green campaigns in the world and declared herself a ‘friend of the earth’. Politicians had a duty, she said, to ‘maintain the planet on a full repairing lease’. And then the most important phrase of all – about gl
obal warming – warning that humanity had ‘unwittingly begun a massive experiment with the system of this planet itself’.

  It was a shocking moment, and for the UK it was the moment the green movement became respectable. It was more difficult to work out the politics of it. Who had actually written the speech? Fingers pointed at Sir Crispin Tickell, the greentinged British ambassador to the United Nations, for the global warming phrase. Mrs Thatcher had listened to his advice since her visit to Mexico City while he was ambassador there. An earthquake had struck in the middle of dinner and she had admired his stiff upper lip.

  But the Thatcher conversion may have had more to do with her regular meetings with Prince Charles. He had enraged her at a crucial moment of inner city rioting by warning (from the distance of Australia) that he didn’t want to ‘inherit a divided kingdom’. Regular meetings at 10 Downing Street were started to patch up their relationship: Charles was probably one of the few people with decidedly different views she had regular meetings with. By 1988, he was being roundly condemned by one property developer for being ‘hi-jacked by the loony green brigade’.