The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy. David Boyle
you are said to be ‘calculating’, people could mean one of two things about you – both related and equally repellent. It could mean that you are constantly comparing what is best for you in any given situation. This is not a compliment. It implies something cold, fish-like and completely self-interested. But it could also mean you are someone who counts too much, someone who measures things but can’t see the reality behind them.
There is something equally clinical about that, but disinterested rather than self-interested. A calculating person, in this sense, is someone for whom the world past the end of their nose is a foreign country. And although we have become exactly that with all our counting, and increasingly so, it can send a shiver down the spine when you come across extreme examples. Like the eighteenth-century prodigy Jedediah Buxton, in his first trip to the theatre to see a performance of Shakespeare’s Richard III. Asked later whether he’d enjoyed it, all he could say was that there were 5,202 steps during the dances and 12,445 words spoken by the actors. Nothing about what the words said, about the winter of our discontent made glorious summer; nothing about the evil hunchback king.
Today, Buxton would probably be described as autistic. It is particularly horrifying to hear that his numbers turned out to be exactly right.
The story is funny now as then, but it is also faintly disturbing, and I have been wondering why this is. It could be that we see Jedediah Buxton as a fearsome symbol of the modern age, counting everything but seeing the significance of nothing. But I think it is deeper than that. There is something inhuman about it – not so much the ability to count, but the failure to be moved. We shiver, I think, at anybody with no emotions – as if they were completely amoral, like Dr Strangelove. We shrink from white-coated doctors too like cold calculating machines. Even doctors should be slightly fallible.
Even so, we encounter these ‘calculating’ machines almost every day. It’s hard not to turn on the news without audibly tripping over one of them. Like the academic who refuses to pass judgement on any problem, however urgent, because there hasn’t been enough research. Or the politician who is so obsessed with the polling figures that he can no longer trust his gut instincts. Or the social scientist who has laboriously proved with the use of statistics something which anybody else with an ounce of common sense knew already – that the death of a parent can scar a child for life, or that alcoholics have an unusually high depression rate. It’s official, they say. Like the University of Michigan study which revealed that children who don’t take exercise and eat junk food tend to be fatter. Or the recent research which showed that areas of high unemployment tend to have fewer jobs.
Then there are the familiar people who muddle up the numbers with the truth. Or, even worse, those who think you can change the truth just by changing the statistics. Don’t forget those dismal agriculture ministers who urged the public to listen to the scientists over the safety of BSE beef (and really believed it) even though they were quietly suppressing the research of anybody who argued that it might not be safe to eat.
These are modern monsters, but none of us can completely escape the accusation. We’re all tied up with figures, even if they are just cricket averages and lottery numbers.
Romantics and leftists traditionally say this is a bad thing. Romantics think that it reduces the individual to mere figures. Leftists think it’s a kind of tyranny. They are both wrong in the sense that we do need to be able to count – but they are right too. The strange thing is that ratcheting up the calculations has often been done for excellent humanitarian reasons, driven by impeccably radical reformers. Of course in the history of the tyranny of numbers over life there are crazed scientists and Nazis with branding irons who stalk through the pages. This is no scientific history of counting, and there is no account of the great statistical pioneers like Herbert Spencer or Karl Pearson. Nor does it cover the byways of scientific research or IQ – or the people who really believed you could control individuals by counting them.
But counting was also a way of improving the world. Maybe they wanted to prove the existence of great inequality or disease, like Edwin Chadwick. Maybe they wanted to find a way of aggregating the national accounts to defeat Hitler, like John Maynard Keynes. Or maybe they wanted to force politicians to worry about people’s happiness, like Jeremy Bentham. All the historic interludes I’ve chosen in this book fall into that category. They are people who – for the best of motives – brought forth the flood of numbers and calculations into the non-scientific parts of our lives.
It still is a way of improving the world. Are your schools not performing as well as they should? Then measure their results. Are you worried about the performance of a local council, a company, a great institution, a hospital? Send in the auditors, set some standards as benchmarks. You don’t trust the professionals? Summarize their decisions in number form, send in the cost-benefit experts and keep your beady eye on them. It is the modern way. Numbers – like money – drive out the mysterious power of elites, the clubbable atmosphere of the professions, the we-know-best patronizing attitudes of those thick-set people with glasses and firm handshakes who used to lord it over our lives. We can control them if we can reduce their complex professionalism to numbers.
The trouble is that the numbers have proliferated, and it’s sometimes hard to breathe – still less tell the difference between one statistic and another. It is difficult enough to remember your car registration number, PIN number, home, work and mobile phone numbers all at the same time. It’s almost enough to make you coldly calculating.
II
If you want to watch people who go further than that – people who try to measure things which can probably never be measured – then come with me for a moment to the closing minutes of a libel action at the Law Courts in the Strand, London. The jury has decided that when a national newspaper described a respectable lady as a prostitute – when she was no such thing – they had clearly ‘lowered her in the estimation of right thinking people,’ which is one legal definition of libel. But what kind of damages should she be given?
The amount awarded is a decision for the jury, and the judge is not allowed to even hint at a figure. He cannot suggest to them that the average pay-out might be £10,000 or £500,000. His half-moon spectacles perched on the end of his nose, he turns to the jury box. ‘Imagine if you will,’ he says, ‘a small flat in Battersea. Or perhaps a semi-detached in Maida Vale. Or maybe a penthouse apartment in Mayfair …’
And so he goes on. Did the humiliation the woman received deserve the flat, the house or the penthouse? Or something else? How could you start to measure such things? But the jury played safe and plumped for the house, and who can say whether they were right or not? ‘If this is justice, I’m a banana,’ said the editor of Private Eye famously with damages of £600,000 awarded against him in the same court. Damages are notoriously difficult to judge, but sometimes you still have to try.
Libel damages are just one example among many. What makes this such a peculiar moment in the history of measurement is that in almost every area of public life, qualities like happiness, competence or loyalty are being picked over by hordes of radical accountants and politicians, visionary entrepreneurs and planners – desperately trying to find ways of being more effective in a competitive world.
Despite the proliferation of measurements, somehow the numbers are still not providing an effective lever. Why? Because, so often, you can’t measure what’s really important. But it’s all very well to say it is impossible: decisions still have to be made – and if you don’t count what’s really important, it gets ignored. It doesn’t count. There are only so many resources, so doctors must compare the quality of life of a 70-year-old with heart failure against a suicidal teenager with a long history of depression. Planners have to compare the pleasure and disruption brought by a new 18-screen cinema with the contentment of keeping the site as a park. Investors have to compare a notoriously polluting oil company with a dodgy record in human rights with a tremendously successful Internet company with three employees and no profits.
It’s impossible of course, but they have to try, because otherwise the wrong decision will be made or their rivals will steal an advantage. So they find themselves isolating something which can