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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
July 25, 2010
Good news
Let me record in passing how happy I am that the Harper government is getting rid of the "long form" of the census. Or rather, I wish it were doing so entirely: instead it is replacing one of innumerable arbitrary invasions of the citizen's privacy and freedom with something "voluntary."Still, one may hope this will give results so obviously skewed as to be unusable, since a voluntary long form can appeal only to people who enjoy meeting bureaucratic requirements, and we can at least hope that they are unrepresentative of the general population. There may well be people who enjoy tax audits, too, or spending time in jail, or enduring hours of excruciating pain in a Canadian hospital waiting room. But that is their business, and I would only observe that in the absence of Nanny State, such people could probably find commercially listed services that would minister to their pleasures. Those of us lacking masochistic tendencies could meanwhile get on with our lives. I have written before, and from several angles, about the evils that flow not so much from the merely wasteful gathering of statistics, as from the uses to which statistics are put, and the addling of the minds of the users. Few drugs are as debilitating, and even in the course of his narcotic dreams, the drug addict seldom tries to impose his view of reality on the rest of us. This pertains not only to government, but to business, incidentally. While an investor needs some idea of numbers to grasp proportions, the point at which additional detail becomes counter-productive is quickly reached. Obsessions about monthly, quarterly, and annual results feed the myopia that leads so many capitalist enterprises into extinction, even in markets where demand never falters. Executives lose sight of the structural order of things, of the longer-term requirements of survival, because their attention is fixed on crunching the numbers at hand. Competitive zeal is itself channelled into numerical games: how to get the lead on a rival in current or (at best) approaching seasons. Well, "all paid jobs absorb and degrade the mind" -- but the investor with his own money (and that of his descendants) on the line, should be looking more broadly at what may occur the day after the current trendline alters. For that is when "the men will be separated from the boys." Canada now has a population of roughly 34 million, according to reports. We could know this, and a great deal more, without the successor to the blessed old, once relatively harmless, Dominion Bureau of Statistics. It makes no difference if the number is 33,841,210, or 34,013,952 -- except in tripping a few computer-calculated ratios all down the line, from one artificial category into another, with basically unknowable but nevertheless real fiscal consequences. The whole of social science has been similarly broadsided by the arithmetical mania. It is worth noting that the greatest economic thinkers, from Smith through Hayek, wrote almost entirely without tables and charts, dwelling instead on the consequences of morally loaded ideas, whereas the demographic muse led economists like Malthus into monstrous visions of purely imaginary catastrophes, and wicked speculations about what would be needed to avoid them. Likewise, the environmentalism of our own age is contaminated throughout by this Malthusian propensity to follow the numbers out the window. Never listen to people who think the cure for human problems is to reduce the number of humans. Their minds are diseased. Too great precision, in a matter that does not admit of precision, is an evil in itself. And if Aristotle could explain this, with clarity, something like 2,340 years ago, we should have caught on by now. Indeed, it was from that sage that I learned to distrust the motives of those seeking too great precision and realized that much modern science, too, is reduced to scientism by statistical methods. My hero among ornithologists, the late Alexander Skutch, personified the realization that, given the shortness of one human life, it makes more sense to closely observe the actual behaviour of actual birds in the actual field -- and use one's actual human reason to account for it -- than to spend one's time generating numbers, and then trying to analyse them. He was not afflicted by the number-crunching myopia, and as a consequence contributed more to his science than all the statistical birdwatchers you could carefully add together. As ever, with anything Stephen Harper does, I suspect something a little more subtle and devious than meets the eye. Since I agree with about four in five of his motives for being subtle and devious, I am complacent about him remaining prime minister for a while longer. Lies, damned lies, and statistics -- all are used to advance the various "progressive" agendas -- and when the progressive types squeal like pigs that Harper is taking something away from them, I can't help smiling to myself. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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