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imomusFirst there was GDP, gross domestic product, and the statisticians looked upon their work and saw that it was good. And lo, one of them said "Let us divide GDP by population, for some nations contain multitudes!" And from that day forth there was GDP per capita, and the statisticians saw that they could compare the wealth of a citizen of one country with the wealth of a citizen in any other, and they agreed that this was good.
And so, in today's Japan Times, for instance, an article entitled China as Number Three (a reference to the 1979 book Japan as Number One, now out of print) states: "China as a country is rich, but Chinese are not. GDP per capita in China was $2,800 in 2007; by contrast, in Germany, average income was $38,800. China is ranked among the bottom tier of nations by this yardstick. Chinese are proud of their country's economic accomplishments, but they also measure how the economic development has affected their own lives. The greater the economic disparities, the greater their own discontent."
And lo, the statisticians read sentences like these, and from them came a wailing and a sighing and a gnashing of teeth. How, they wondered, could they develop new indices which measured that subjective thing, well-being?
And then a voice spoke up in a podcast. It was Anil Markandya of the University of Bath, who in 2007 shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change. Professor Markandya's lecture is a useful introduction to the new tools which are currently being developed as measures for well-being.
And lo, the adjustments Professor Markandya suggested to simple measurements of GDP did begin, it has to be said, with his own subject of special interest, sustainability. We must, he said, measure a nation's Ecological Footprint and the environmental damage it creates. We must measure Emissions Per Capita too. But, he continued, the Mac index (the cost of a Big Mac in various places, or purchasing power) is also an adjustment we should make. And so is Unemployment, and the Corruption Perception Index, Life Expectancy, Healthy Life Years, Happy Life Years, Intangible Capital (good governance, the rule of law, education), Social Capital (the network of relations and institutions that make it possible for countries to function well) and Genuine Savings (an adjustment of gross savings to reflect depletion of natural resources and pollution damages).
At this the statisticians grew restive. Many questioned the value of measuring all these intangible things and subtracting their value from the hard science of numbers, as if they were equally objective. Many found it suspicious that the proposed measures happened to tally with the agenda of the World Bank, or with certain eco-campaigns. Some said that the focus on individual nations was wrong, that only a global picture of the symbiosis between all these statistics could create an accurate model. Yet most agreed that these new tools could only increase the demand for trained statisticians, and stake a claim to new territory -- closer to the human soul! -- for their profession. It could only be a matter of time before governments published figures for Sunshine Capital, Orgasm Capital, Morality Capital, and a National War Guilt Index.
Already there were signs of this coming statistical utopia: the Osberg Sharp indicators of consumption, wealth, economic equality and future security (which nevertheless fail to show that the US is the best place to be a rich child, but for the poor child the best place is Norway), or the Human Development Index, a basket of rights and wrongs which shows all nations improving except those in Sub-Saharan Africa (the fall guy region in almost all well-being science, just as Scandinavia tends to be well-being's 800-pound gorilla).
Then there was The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which sorted Americans into those Thriving, Struggling and Suffering. Conducted in early 2008, this poll already reflected the impact of the gathering financial crisis: "Among the top 10 days with highest levels of reported negative experiences, many were days that coincided with bad news from the financial markets". The same poll, repeated a year later, would certainly show more Americans in the Struggling and Suffering categories, for old-fashioned economic reasons.
Personally, I find the statistics of well-being at its most interesting when it's most pretentious, and reaches for numbers to pin to the most nebulous and perverse impulses of the human psyche. But statisticians have a long way to go before they can match the pretentiousness and inventiveness of market researchers. It was on the occasion of our examination of Kartoffelgrafiken (potato-shaped market segmentation graphics) that we found perhaps the most useful tool yet devised for the measurement of well-being: Kumakouji's graph of Cat Ownership to Yam Appreciation.
But let us never forget the warning in the Book of Revelation: "When accountants get creative and statisticians speak like priests, then the Last Days are upon us."
And so, in today's Japan Times, for instance, an article entitled China as Number Three (a reference to the 1979 book Japan as Number One, now out of print) states: "China as a country is rich, but Chinese are not. GDP per capita in China was $2,800 in 2007; by contrast, in Germany, average income was $38,800. China is ranked among the bottom tier of nations by this yardstick. Chinese are proud of their country's economic accomplishments, but they also measure how the economic development has affected their own lives. The greater the economic disparities, the greater their own discontent."
And lo, the statisticians read sentences like these, and from them came a wailing and a sighing and a gnashing of teeth. How, they wondered, could they develop new indices which measured that subjective thing, well-being?
And then a voice spoke up in a podcast. It was Anil Markandya of the University of Bath, who in 2007 shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on climate change. Professor Markandya's lecture is a useful introduction to the new tools which are currently being developed as measures for well-being.
And lo, the adjustments Professor Markandya suggested to simple measurements of GDP did begin, it has to be said, with his own subject of special interest, sustainability. We must, he said, measure a nation's Ecological Footprint and the environmental damage it creates. We must measure Emissions Per Capita too. But, he continued, the Mac index (the cost of a Big Mac in various places, or purchasing power) is also an adjustment we should make. And so is Unemployment, and the Corruption Perception Index, Life Expectancy, Healthy Life Years, Happy Life Years, Intangible Capital (good governance, the rule of law, education), Social Capital (the network of relations and institutions that make it possible for countries to function well) and Genuine Savings (an adjustment of gross savings to reflect depletion of natural resources and pollution damages).At this the statisticians grew restive. Many questioned the value of measuring all these intangible things and subtracting their value from the hard science of numbers, as if they were equally objective. Many found it suspicious that the proposed measures happened to tally with the agenda of the World Bank, or with certain eco-campaigns. Some said that the focus on individual nations was wrong, that only a global picture of the symbiosis between all these statistics could create an accurate model. Yet most agreed that these new tools could only increase the demand for trained statisticians, and stake a claim to new territory -- closer to the human soul! -- for their profession. It could only be a matter of time before governments published figures for Sunshine Capital, Orgasm Capital, Morality Capital, and a National War Guilt Index.
Already there were signs of this coming statistical utopia: the Osberg Sharp indicators of consumption, wealth, economic equality and future security (which nevertheless fail to show that the US is the best place to be a rich child, but for the poor child the best place is Norway), or the Human Development Index, a basket of rights and wrongs which shows all nations improving except those in Sub-Saharan Africa (the fall guy region in almost all well-being science, just as Scandinavia tends to be well-being's 800-pound gorilla).
Then there was The Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, which sorted Americans into those Thriving, Struggling and Suffering. Conducted in early 2008, this poll already reflected the impact of the gathering financial crisis: "Among the top 10 days with highest levels of reported negative experiences, many were days that coincided with bad news from the financial markets". The same poll, repeated a year later, would certainly show more Americans in the Struggling and Suffering categories, for old-fashioned economic reasons.
Personally, I find the statistics of well-being at its most interesting when it's most pretentious, and reaches for numbers to pin to the most nebulous and perverse impulses of the human psyche. But statisticians have a long way to go before they can match the pretentiousness and inventiveness of market researchers. It was on the occasion of our examination of Kartoffelgrafiken (potato-shaped market segmentation graphics) that we found perhaps the most useful tool yet devised for the measurement of well-being: Kumakouji's graph of Cat Ownership to Yam Appreciation.
But let us never forget the warning in the Book of Revelation: "When accountants get creative and statisticians speak like priests, then the Last Days are upon us."
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come again
Date: 2009-01-27 12:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 01:36 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 02:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 02:35 pm (UTC)"New actuarial tools are emerging today which allow us to measure, in multi-factorial ways, increasingly intangible things like well-being, quality of life and sustainability. In some cases, the results from these new tools are given money values and used to adjust or correct the results from older, simpler, more purely economic measures such as GDP. The more creative and imaginative these new measures become -- and the more we assign dollar values to what are, essentially, states of the human mind and conditions of the human soul -- the more problems we're likely to have in maintaining the credibility of statistics as an objective science. The objectivisation of states of mind comes at a price: the subjectivisation of Statistics."
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 02:40 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 03:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 05:54 pm (UTC)Song
Date: 2009-01-27 07:12 pm (UTC)Will you ever play 'The Guitar Lesson' at one of your future shows? Your older songs are so fucking haunting, what were you possibly thinking about when you wrote this meisterwerk?
Cheers, Brian.
Re: Song
Date: 2009-01-27 07:32 pm (UTC)What I was thinking when I wrote it is pretty much spelled out here (http://imomus.livejournal.com/421538.html).
Re: Song
Date: 2009-01-27 09:58 pm (UTC)The picture's stuck in my head ever since I've seen it.
Greetings!
-r
Re: Song
Date: 2009-01-27 10:02 pm (UTC)You can find more, for instance, here (http://www.designboom.com/history/mapplethorpe.html).
Re: Song
Date: 2009-01-27 10:45 pm (UTC)Re: Song
Date: 2009-01-27 11:07 pm (UTC)Re: Song
Date: 2009-01-27 11:14 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 06:58 am (UTC)Huh? Where do you live? The Playboy mansion?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 02:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 03:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 04:58 pm (UTC)Once enough metrics like these become establish, and start to show that not everything gets 'better' or 'worse' in line with GDP-per-capita, then perhaps politicans will realise that statistics can't be relied upon as a substitute for serious thinking about the kinds of human experiences and social relationships that governments allow to flourish, and those that they attempt to inhibit. With enough metrics, I hope that blind quantitative imperialism will start to collapse in on itself, and start to reveal something a little closer to the qualia of everyday life.
I think GDP, itself, measures a very subjective intangible. After all, it became established in mainstream political discourse as it was seen an adequate proxy for 'utility' (utilitarian political philosophy's instrumentalist, rationalist version of 'well-being), because in the Nineteenth century richer nations seemed to be happier than poor nations (which were owned by rich nations), and rich people tended to be happier than poor people (who suffered occasional bouts of starvation). Ever since then, the tail seems to have been wagging the dog: GDP looks, feels, and smells a lot more 'objective' than messy, fuzzy things like happiness, contentment, well-being, ontological fulfilment and so on... and so by focusing on GDP rather than these other things, politicians can start to feel lulled into a false sense of existential comfort: thinking they know what they're doing (unlike everyone else), and that 'governing' is ultimately just a series of technical problems involving proper economic management.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 12:21 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 12:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 08:25 am (UTC)By using these metrics, the government is already applying a very stringent and shrill moral philosophy as a justification for meddling in almost everyone's lives to a very large extent, but doing this so mechanically that it's blind to the normative claims such actions are performing.
My hope is that providing governments with more metrics, which purport to measure intangibles more directly, will provide to politicians 'objective' evidence that they are meddling with people's lives, and that all interventions have unintended and undesirable consequences. As a result of this then, at the very least, governments will meddle more 'knowingly', and at the most they will meddle less...
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 05:33 pm (UTC)News equals fact times importance
Date: 2009-01-27 09:29 pm (UTC).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 11:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 11:44 pm (UTC)But you'd need to ask Santiago (http://streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/blog/dear-street-carnage-the-hipster-paradigm/).
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 01:46 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 04:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-28 01:58 am (UTC)we have graphs for this too
Date: 2009-01-28 12:12 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 09:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 09:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 09:46 pm (UTC)A good life
Date: 2009-01-27 10:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-27 10:59 pm (UTC)Measuring (and mapping) sustainability
Date: 2009-01-28 12:39 am (UTC)(Guess which country is meeting the minimum criteria for sustainability, according to this chart)
(Animated version here (http://oldspeak.net/hdief/index.html) -- roll over to see the countries names)