A lovely essay, worth your time: Andrew Ferguson, "No Statistics, No Mischief," weeklystandard.com, January 27, 2014 (cover date).
It is about John Cowperthwaite, "a lifelong government bureaucrat who should be lionized by anyone who loathes and fears bureaucracies."
Mr. Cowperthwaite was financial secretary of Hong Kong in the 1960s. "By the time he left office . . . the number of Hong Kongers in poverty had dropped by two-thirds, average wages had risen 50 percent, and Hong Kong had gone from one the poorest places on earth to one of the richest."
Asked once what the greatest and farthest-reaching policy of his tenure was, he replied: . . .
. . . "I abolished the collection of statistics."
. . . .
The connection between statistics and mischief is indissoluble. . . .
. . . .
. . . . Statistics themselves are what create, or at least justify, high taxation and other interventions in the economy. . . . A supply of statistics will spontaneously generate a flock of people who will want to study them, and who, having studied them, will reach conclusions about them, and then, still worse, will want to shape their conclusions into government policy that will tug the citizenry this way or that, distracting workers and businessment alike frm the important task of minding their own business.
. . . .
Cowperthwaite was a humanist in a field that had fallen victim to social science. . . .
. . . . Stripped of his numbers an economist would have to resort to the old home truths about how the world works: If you tax something you get less of it; as a general rule an individual manages his own affairs better than his neighbor can; it's rude to be bossy; the number of problems that resolve themselves if only you wait long enough is far larger than the number of problems solved by mucking around in them. And the cure is often worse than the disease:
In the long run, the aggregate of the decisions of individual businessmen, exercising individual judgment in a free economy, even if often mistaken, is likely to do less harm than the centralized decisions of a Government; and certainly the harm is likely to be counteracted faster.
Somehow the most successful economist of the twentieth century knew this was true, and he didn't have to work out a single equation.
As I said, lovely.
And, in this, the sixth year of the reign of His Highness Barack Hussein Obama, sobering.
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