Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

190 R. Smith
‘Statisticism’, on the analogy of ‘scientism’, has recently been proposed to
capture the ‘obsessive devotion to, or veneration for, statistical evidence as the
sine qua non of genuinely scientific knowledge’ (Lamiell, 2009). However, the
word does not trip off the tongue. I suggest metricophilia, to do justice to the fact
that statistics are only part of the fascination with measurement more generally;
there is more of a suggestion in the word of something pathological (compare,
say, necrophilia). I found it interesting to type ‘love of measurement’ into Google,
partly to see if ‘metricophilia’ has any currency. Most of the first few pages return
sites devoted not to the love of measurement, but to the measurement of love. The
unit of measurement of love is ‘The number of times you think of your loved one
during the day. Also kisses are a good way to tell’ (www.answerbag.com). A book
by Oliver C.S. Tzeng, Measurement of Love and Intimate Relations, offers in its
subtitle Theories, Scales, and Applications for Love Development, Maintenance,
and Dissolution. 1 An article tells us that ‘The silence surrounding the psychological
investigation of love has been broken. Not only is love being examined from a
theoretical framework but better empirical tools are being developed and used’
(Elkins & Smith, 1979, p. 7). And so on.
In what follows, I analyse three prominent and influential cases of metricophilia,
all responses to the well-known failure of increasing affluence to bring higher levels
of well-being in the developed societies of the (largely western) world. These
responses, in the order in which I shall discuss them, are, first, a short newspaper
article on happiness by Richard Layard, sometimes referred to as the UK ‘happiness
czar’. The second is the commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance
and Social Progress (often referred to as the Stiglitz Commission, after its chair,
Joseph Stiglitz). The third response is that of Wilkinson and Pickett in their widely
noticed book The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better
(2009). This is an attempt by two epidemiologists to correlate inequality of income
in developed and better-off countries of the world with all kinds of problems such
as drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness, lower levels of educational performance,
obesity, violence and murder.
In all three cases I shall argue that their prevailing metricophilia leads to oversimplification
and reductionism, and that there is a strong tendency to ignore or
underplay crucial philosophical questions in the faith that better metrics and statistics,
and more of them, will tell us all that we need to know. I also identify, in the first
case I shall analyse in particular, the use of various and luxuriant forms of rhetoric:
a phenomenon that is all the more odd because it is a prime example of the sophistry
that the dispassionate objectivity of metrics, a favourite child of the Enlightenment,
promised to dispel.
13.2 Levelling Happiness
Numerous studies attest to the failure of increasing affluence, in the developed societies
of the world, to bring increased well-being. Much of this work was stimulated
by Richard Easterlin’s 1974 paper, ‘Does Economic Growth Improve the Human
Lot? Some Empirical Evidence’, and the paradox that rising national wealth brings