Educational Research - the Ethics and Aesthetics of Statistics

13 A Bubble for the Spirit Level: Metricophilia, Rhetoric and Philosophy 195
thus (iii) is connected with (ii), but even more so with (i). We shall see this schema
working in similar ways in the other two responses.
The report of the Stiglitz Commission, 3 which was the result of President
Sarkozy’s initiative (above), and is also hyperlinked from Layard’s article, gives further
plentiful evidence of what we might call metricophilia. It is a long document: I
confine myself to the executive summary. Para. 2 reads as follows:
...statistical indicators are important for designing and assessing policies aiming at advancing
the progress of society, as well as for assessing and influencing the functioning of
economic markets. Their role has increased significantly over the last two decades. This
reflects improvements in the level of education in the population, increases in the complexity
of modern economies and the widespread use of information technology. In the
‘information society’, access to data, including statistical data, is much easier. More and
more people look at statistics to be better informed or to make decisions. To respond to the
growing demand for information, the supply of statistics has also increased considerably,
covering new domains and phenomena.
There is a strong sense here that, as J.-F. Lyotard (1984) predicted, what cannot be
encoded in the bits and bytes of information technology comes to be seen as of only
marginal importance. More complex societies – or at any rate economies – require
ever more statistical indicators, it seems; but we may wonder whether these will do
justice to the complex societies they are required to measure. I return to this point
below.
The central shift in the work of the Commission is away from measuring economic
production. Yet, there is some ambivalence concerning what the shift moves
us to. Sometimes it seems to be towards measuring income and consumption, and
sometimes towards measuring well-being. It is the move to an interest in well-being
rather than GDP that is often hailed as the crucial step forward the Commission has
taken. This move is encapsulated in recommendation 1: ‘When evaluating material
well-being, look at income and consumption rather than production’. The phrase
‘material well-being’ encapsulates the ambivalence, for sometimes talk is of wellbeing
tout court, while at other times it is the ‘material’ that is central. On the one
hand, traffic jams may increase GDP through an increase in the consumption of fuel,
but they hardly improve quality of life (para. 5). On the other hand, the paragraphs
that follow recommendation 1 speak exclusively of material living standards (paras
22 and 23: the next two paragraphs speak of ‘living standards’, but by now it is clear
that this is shorthand).
A bold headline before para. 28 declares that ‘Well-being is multi-dimensional’.
The Commission identifies a number of key dimensions that ‘should be considered
simultaneously’: material living standards; health; education; personal activities
including work; political voice and governance; social connections and relationships;
environment, present and future; insecurity, economic and physical (para. 28).
Many of these ‘are missed by conventional income measures’ (ibid.). Here, it might
seem, we have a welcome acknowledgement that people value an incommensurable
diversity of goods. However, recommendation 6, which follows this paragraph,
begins by insisting that ‘Quality of life depends on people’s objective conditions and
capabilities’ (my emphasis). The next paragraph (para. 29) writhes uncomfortably