The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy

The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy
David Boyle

Never before have we attempted to measure as much as we do today. Why are we so obsessed with numbers? What can they really tell us?Too often we try to quantify what can’t actually be measured. We count people, but not individuals. We count exam results rather than intelligence, benefit claimants instead of poverty. The government has set itself 10,000 new targets. Politicians pack their speeches with skewed statistics: crime rates are either rising or falling depending on who is doing the counting.We are in a world in which everything designed only to be measured. If it can’t be measured it can be ignored.But the big problem is what numbers don’t tell you. They won’t interpret. They won’t inspire, and they won’t tell you precisely what causes what.In this passionately argued and thought-provoking book, David Boyle examines our obsession with numbers. He reminds us of the danger of taking numbers so seriously at the expense of what is non-measurable, non-calculable: intuition, creativity, imagination, happiness…Counting is a vital human skill. Yardsticks are a vital tool. As long as we remember how limiting they are if we cling to them too closely.Americans who claim to have been abducted by aliens = 3.7 millionAverage time spent by British people in traffic jams every year = 11 daysNumber of Americans shot by children under six between 1983 and 1993 = 138, 490

THE TYRANNY OF NUMBERS

Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy

David Boyle

Contents

Cover (#udca9dee7-93c8-565f-bbe6-f290fbb55cf0)

Title Page (#u3026d26e-0b5b-5103-9e7a-826e6d84230e)

Dedication (#ulink_d20694fb-4b81-55e2-891f-baedcc623005)

Introduction: Still Life with Numbers (#u84be7350-40ad-57c2-9abe-c5724dab957e)

Chapter 1: A Short History of Counting (#u7c2af22a-e531-59c4-ada9-9da21cefbd72)

Chapter 2: Historical Interlude 1: Legislator for the World (#uc6d10461-cff0-599a-a939-963090da295a)

Chapter 3: Elusive Happiness (#uafed602b-37d1-5be2-a8ac-2ef32d48a046)

Chapter 4: Historical Interlude 2: Commissioner of Fact (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 5: The Feelgood Factor (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 6: Historical Interlude 3: Social Copernicus (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 7: The New Auditors (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 8: Historical Interlude 4: National Accountant (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 9: The New Indicators (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 10: Historical Interlude 5: The Price of Everything (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter 11: The Bottom Line is the Bottom Line (#litres_trial_promo)

Postscript (#litres_trial_promo)

Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

Index (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

Dedication (#ulink_6a70494b-c3f5-5aee-afb4-4eeed503d10a)

For Joanna, Ben, Agatha and Frances

Introduction (#ulink_71173a14-9e16-573a-ab90-a27c61ca49a1)

Still Life with Numbers

The renowned cosmologist Professor Bignumska, lecturing on the future of the universe, had stated that in a billion years according to her calculations, the earth would fall into the sun in a fiery death. In the back of the auditorium a tremulous voice piped up. ‘Excuse me Professor, but h-how long did you say it would be?’ Professor Bignumska calmly replied, ‘About a billion years.’ A sigh of relief was heard. ‘Whew! For a minute there, I thought you said a million years.’

Douglas Hofstadter,Scientific American, May 1982

There are no such things as still lifes.

Erica Jong

I

Mary Poppins was the first film I ever saw. I was six years, four months old – let’s measure it precisely. I remember trotting as fast as I could beside my father along Whitehall, past the Treasury and the other palaces of national calculation, to the Haymarket. I remember the strange red torches and the national anthem at the end. That’s how it was in those more deferential and innocent days before the hippies. And I remember being completely blown away by the experience, the songs of Julie Andrews and the idea that life should be a little more magical than it was.

Within weeks I knew most of the lyrics by heart, though I barely understood the words. Maybe, in retrospect, I was also a little influenced by Mary Poppins’ ridicule of George Banks – Hollywood has recycled the name George Banks for pompous boobies ever since – and his fascination for the kind of order brought by numbers. ‘They must feel the thrill of totting up a balance book,’ she sings to poor deluded George about his children:

… A thousand cyphers neatly in a row.

When gazing at a graph that shows the profits up,

their little cup of joy should overflow.

The irony is lost on him – as it was on me. And though Hollywood is still busily promoting the idea of magic, you would never catch them in this post-Thatcherite age making fun of profits or ridiculing the vital importance of calculation – still less the idea of cyphers neatly in a row. It’s just too important to us all these days.

So I came away from the cinema determined to make sure I flung my tuppence away on some little old bird woman, rather than marvelling at the strange alchemy of compound interest if I put it in the bank. I was not going to be a George Banks. Yet here I am, 35 years later, with my pension and life insurance, living in a world completely overwhelmed by numbers and calculation.

It’s the same for nearly all of us. There are personal calculations to be made each day, about investments, journey times, bank machines and credit cards. There are professional figures at work, in the form of targets, statistics, workforce percentages and profit forecasts. As consumers, we are counted and aggregated according to every purchase we make. Every time we are exposed to the media, there is a positive flood of statistics controlling and interpreting the world, developing each truth, simplifying each problem. ‘Being a man is unhealthy,’ said the front page of the Evening Standard recently, adding – like every similar newspaper article about statistics – the word: ‘official.’ As if we had been wondering about the truth all these years and, thanks to the counters, we now know. As if the figures are so detached that there is no arguing with them.

But of course we keep arguing. Just as the government keeps arguing despite its battery of benchmarks, quality indicators and league tables, as it struggles to hold back chaos like King Canute in front of the waves. We take our collective pulses 24 hours a day with the use of statistics. We understand life that way, though somehow the more figures we use, the great truths still seem to slip through our fingers. Despite all that calculating, and all that numerical control, we feel as ignorant as ever.

Mary Poppins might have been talking about me when she said that ‘sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can’t see past the end of his nose’. She meant George Banks, of course, but I feel just as myopic myself. Life never keeps still long enough to measure anything important.

If 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.