Quantifying the World: UN Ideas and Statistics

Prologue

1 Prologue How should policymakers and ordinary people look at the world? What perspective do they get when they see a conventional set of official numbers? How might their views change if they were to be presented with a different range of information relating to the same issues? This book is about the way the field of international statistics, which was developed in the postwar period , has shaped our understanding of the world. It provides contemporary answers to the above questions. In an earlier era, say, two centuries ago, when administrators were confronted with the challenge to reduce the burdens placed on society by the poor, the responses to these questions would have been quite different. In part, this difference is evidence of the fact that “progress” has been made, but it is also evidence that the problems have changed. Statistics have contributed to a continually evolving perspective of what is important and to the solution of the problems facing societies. The United Nations has played a major role in measuring world phenomena and quantifying the importance of different human activities. This book explains how various ideas and ways of thinking within the UN organization as well as initiatives arising from outside the institution have influenced the production of statistics and guided data development. The following overview is set within the context of the broad sweep of economic history and political events that have shaped the past fifty years or more. The intention is to explore the role of the UN in the political philosophy of official statistics against a background of the attention paid by the organization to the general process of international economic, social, and environmental development. Box 0.1. The Historical Concern with Poverty and Its Measurement Adam Smith, who is famous for being the founding father of classical economics, is less well known for being a champion of the poor and weak and for advocating on behalf of their political rather than their economic freedom. He believed that the unbridled pursuit of self-interest would favor the rich and powerful and was not conducive to the public 2 Quantifying the World An International Statistical System: A UN Success The creation of a universally acknowledged statistical system and of a general framework guiding the collection and compilation of data according to recognized professional standards both internationally and nationally has been one of the great and mostly unsung successes of the UN organization. The good. He supported free trade in corn because it made the poor less vulnerable to the incidence of local harvest failures and famine. He opposed government intervention not because of his belief in the powerful influence of “the invisible hand” but because in the late eighteenth century that hand was often arbitrary and gave authority to officials who could not be trusted to act fairly. He believed that the freedom to make decisions based on available information and the ability to exercise free will in choosing how to live were every human being’s right. Smith was considered by many to be a radical and a friend of French philosophy; it is certain he knew of the reforming ideas of Turgot and Condorcet in France. Both Frenchmen were reformers: Turgot, a prominent minister before the Revolution, and Condorcet, his one-time secretary, developed public works programs to support employment of the poor and devised schemes to ameliorate the effects of famine. Turgot faded from public life with the fall of the ancien regime and Condorcet was killed in Robespierre’s subsequent reign of terror, an unfitting reward for someone who had held the interests of the poor so close at heart.1 Only two decades later, in 1797, Sir Frederic Morton Eden produced his monumental three-volume study, The State of the Poor, in England and Wales. One of Eden’s intentions was to provide a balance to the general optimism that he had seen in response to Smith’s Wealth of Nations. His work influenced Sydney and Beatrice Webb as they produced their minority report to the official Report of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress, and it had a major impact somewhat later in the nineteenth century on the thinking of Karl Marx, who had nothing but praise for Eden and criticism for Smith.2 Charles Booth, who belonged to a wealthy shipping and industrial family from England , declared that his main objective in producing his seventeen volumes on The Life and Labour of...