Liars, Damned Liars and Statisticians

Chris Huhne is a liar. It’s a matter of record, as it is for many an MP, but even a jail sentence hasn’t much hampered Mr Huhne’s ability to profit personally from his continuing political career. And if there was any such thing as religious justice (Hint: There isn’t) Tony Blair would eventually become (literally) a damned liar despite the riches he denies he has accumulated from spreading his tactical and strategic untruths, half-truths… and downright statistics. But all the lies of politicians through the ages are pale in comparison with those of their enablers, the statisticians.

In the news right now:  Employment is up but productivity is down, but more people are in work, yet pay hasn’t risen in line with inflation, but that’s okay because both unemployment and employment are at record levels in the right directions… but people are – I forget, is it worse off, or better off? And how would we know? The answer is, we don’t; we can’t. But that doesn’t stop the headline makers from stuffing column inches with numbers explained by incomprehensible vox-astutis soundbites.

Take me. Today I’m better off than I was last year, but in 2012 I was better off still, yet the ‘most-bestest-off’ I ever managed to be was in 1982. Then I joined the ranks of homeowners and profited… nowhere near as well as the media would have you believe I should have. Ten years later I was earning plenty more in real terms than when I was at my very-bestest-off, but my house had nowhere near kept up with the reported mahoosive rises in, it seemed, every other part of the country. So was I better off, or worse off? It’s hard to tell; tricky stuff this money.

One thing is for sure though, comparing your income with that of others is a poor indicator of, well, poverty. One man’s penury is another man’s self-reliance and a fortune for most of us might be squandered in a blur of immoderate hedonism by others. Nobody is ‘the norm’ so comparisons against that norm are pointless… and statisticians know this. It’s why they never get found out. A statistician can sell the same numbers to multiple buyers for fat fees and never be asked to justify those numbers because, knowing that the rest of us understand even less about mathematics than they do, the ‘facts’ that statistical surveys reveal can be bent to any shape you desire.

And it’s not just money. Thus a new car factory in Sunderland can spell variously: prosperity and much-needed jobs for the region, back-hand deals in smoky rooms, denial of employment in another European country (which these days is racism and therefore hateful and to be labelled fascism) more GDP, less GDP, a skills shortage, a skills surplus, an immigration problem, white flight, earthquakes, tornadoes, or god’s holy wrath, all depending on who is spinning the news and why.

The unofficial Law of Unintended Consequences and the application of Chaos Theory tells us that if a butterfly flaps its wings in the Stock Exchange, somebody wins the lottery in Panama and a Chinese fella gets laid off from a counterfeiting factory three miles outside Guangzhou. To a statistician this is solid gold – cut liberally with bullshit it can be sold for big bucks to dodgy dealers who will then further adulterate it and push it on street corners to the recreational stats-junky market with the cry: "Daily Mirror! Daily Mail!" They say that 20% of school-leavers in Britain today are functionally illiterate. They’re the lucky ones.

Diversinetiks

So there I was, happily engaged in my pretend intellectual antidote to all those awful reality shows, killing the time between Andrew Marr and The Daily Politics by idly watching Sunday Morning Live, when it suddenly came to me. I’ve got it all wrong. Everything; my entire world view is just… wrong.

Simon Fanshawe stated that instead of hiring the best man/woman for the job, you should hire for diversity. He justified that because ‘research’ showed that companies with diverse workforces were more creative and thus more productive, recruiters should forget about competence and instead rely on their conscience. Their conscience of course, having been infused with the established, soothing, lentilly mantras about the inherent goodness of ‘divers thynges’.

Hmmm, chicken and egg, surely? Are diverse companies successful, or do large, successful companies with worldwide trade naturally become more diverse? And anyway, diversity for its own sake cannot be automatically good. Should every football club be compelled to field teams with at least a proportion of the players being selected more for their abstract thinking than for their footballing skills? Or should we insist the fashion industry be represented on the catwalk by, say, 10% of models being selected from the morbidly obese?

You can’t just legislate for diversity, no matter how much the likes of Fanshawe insist. If, for instance, your trade was an Indian restaurant I doubt very much that anybody would dare to insist you employed sullen white teens to diversify your enterprise and inject a bit of spice. In fact you’d probably get a flash mob of grievance-for-hire protesters demanding you be allowed the right to discriminate and employ as many illegal immigrants as you could smuggle in. Such is the moveable feast of diktat.

Anyway, I Googled Mr Fanshawe and his Wikipedia entry has him down as a comedian, media luvvy and general gob for hire – in other words a career (and an honour, no less) based on un-provable opinion, baseless claims from spurious research and general, all-round frippery. Nobody cares for facts or instinct or common sense any more – that sort of knowledge is given away freely wherever you look and in the world of commerce, politics and vested interests if it doesn’t cost a packet it must be worthless. As Lord Ashcroft said this morning on the radio, “in politics, perception IS reality”.

The apparent logic is that it is far better to pay for expensive studies, carried out by earnest sociology students to reach predetermined conclusions about what people want than to actually, you know, ask people what they want. Much more effective to throw tons of money at a problem that may not exist, creating millionaires from the extracted taxes of people with no say in how their money is spent than to, you know, ask people whether they actually want what you’re making them pay for.

All these years I’ve been stupid enough to believe that making something and selling it for more than it costs to make, yet at a price the market will bear, thus yielding a profit from which I can take a wage, leaving funds to reinvest in more of my industry was the right way to make a living. But why not cut out the uncertain parts of that process – the sourcing of materials and fabrication of the products – with all the vagaries of prices and labour and competition?

No, sod that; I could just sell ideas. Better than that, I could sell people’s own ideas back to them; become a one-man think tank or pollster or even better, become an ‘expert’. And it works; in the face of little or no evidence, I could create beliefs, from which I could profit. Just like the ‘experts’ have done with global warming, management consultancy, psychology, homeopathy, the EU and the cult of celebrity. As an expert I could garner state funding for research with which to engender beliefs that could influence policy and divert yet more funds to my cause. I smell the diesel scent of the gravy train.

From spurious beliefs was conjured up the rag-tag army of militants to spit at, shout scum and generally harass ordinary, sincere people attending the Conservative Party conference. By ramping up the rhetoric of ‘suffering’ a multitude can be called on to protest, convinced that living within our means is now cruel hardship. And despite more and more money being thrown at a poorly managed state behemoth, the same mob believes the NHS is at greater risk from the Tories than from the party that managed to spend the entire country into ruin.

Diversity - the same old shit, repackaged

So, I reckon I’ll have some of that. Coming soon, my learned papers on Aromapolitics, Homeosocioversity, Diversinetiks, Politicorrectity… Whole new ways of thinking; of creating synergistic solutions for the uploading of axiomatic conversations about the interconnectivity of life systems and wellness, of cyber-societal satisfaction… There’s a whole new world to pay for. And boy, will you pay for it…