The ability of statistics to accurately represent the world is declining. In its wake, a new age of big data controlled by private companies is taking over – and putting democracy in peril
In theory, statistics should help settle arguments. They ought to provide stable reference points that everyone – no matter what their politics – can agree on. Yet in recent years, divergent levels of trust in statistics has become one of the key schisms that have opened up in western liberal democracies. Shortly before the November presidential election, a study in the US discovered that 68% of Trump supporters distrusted the economic datapublished by the federal government.
.. In the UK, a research project by Cambridge University and YouGov looking at conspiracy theories discovered that 55% of the population believes that the government “is hiding the truth about the number of immigrants living here”.
.. One of its main findings is that people often respond warmly to qualitative evidence, such as the stories of individual migrants and photographs of diverse communities. But statistics – especially regarding alleged benefits of migration to Britain’s economy – elicit quite the opposite reaction. People assume that the numbers are manipulated and dislike the elitism of resorting to quantitative evidence.
.. The problem is that the government is now engaged in self-censorship, for fear of provoking people further.
.. The declining authority of statistics – and the experts who analyse them – is at the heart of the crisis that has become known as “post-truth” politics. And in this uncertain new world, attitudes towards quantitative expertise have become increasingly divided. From one perspective, grounding politics in statistics is elitist, undemocratic and oblivious to people’s emotional investments in their community and nation. It is just one more way that privileged people in London, Washington DC or Brussels seek to impose their worldview on everybody else. From the opposite perspective, statistics are quite the opposite of elitist. They enable journalists, citizens and politicians to discuss society as a whole, not on the basis of anecdote, sentiment or prejudice, but in ways that can be validated. The alternative to quantitative expertise is less likely to be democracy than an unleashing of tabloid editors and demagogues to provide their own “truth” of what is going on across society.
.. This raises the alarming question of how – if at all – we will continue to have common ideas of society and collective progress, should statistics fall by the wayside.
.. ince the high-point of the Enlightenment in the late 18th century, liberals and republicans have invested great hope that national measurement frameworks could produce a more rational politics, organised around demonstrable improvements in social and economic life.
.. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of “the public interest” is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.
.. the contemporary populist attack on “experts” is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have “lost touch” with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular.
.. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their “imagined community” does not exist.
.. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways.
.. the location of economic activity far more important, exacerbating the inequality between successful locations (such as London or San Francisco) and less successful locations (such as north-east England or the US rust belt). The key geographic units involved are no longer nation states. Rather, it is cities, regions or individual urban neighbourhoods that are rising and falling.
.. Headline-grabbing national indicators, such as GDP and inflation, conceal all sorts of localised gains and losses that are less commonly discussed by national politicians.
.. when politicians use national indicators to make their case, they implicitly assume some spirit of patriotic mutual sacrifice on the part of voters: you might be the loser on this occasion, but next time you might be the beneficiary. But what if the tables are never turned? What if the same city or region wins over and over again, while others always lose?
.. What if many of the defining questions of our age are not answerable in terms of the extent of people encompassed, but the intensity with which people are affected?
.. the focus on “unemployment” masked the rise of underemployment, that is, people not getting a sufficient amount of work or being employed at a level below that which they are qualified for.
.. It wouldn’t be all that surprising if these same people became suspicious of policy experts and the use of statistics in political debate, given the mismatch between what politicians say about the labour market and the lived reality.
.. it is not enough simply to know which box someone would prefer to put an “X” in. One also needs to know whether they feel strongly enough about doing so to bother. And when it comes to capturing such fluctuations in emotional intensity, polling is a clumsy tool.
.. Figures close to Donald Trump, such as his chief strategist Steve Bannon and the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, are closely acquainted with cutting-edge data analytics techniques, via companies such as Cambridge Analytica, on whose board Bannon sits. During the presidential election campaign, Cambridge Analytica drew on various data sources to develop psychological profiles of millions of Americans, which it then used to help Trump target voters with tailored messaging.
.. The new apparatus of number-crunching is well suited to detecting trends, sensing the mood and spotting things as they bubble up. It serves campaign managers and marketers very well. It is less well suited to making the kinds of unambiguous, objective, potentially consensus-forming claims about society that statisticians and economists are paid for.
.. A post-statistical society is a potentially frightening proposition, not because it would lack any forms of truth or expertise altogether, but because it would drastically privatise them. Statistics are one of many pillars of liberalism, indeed of Enlightenment.
.. But the battle that will need to be waged in the long term is not between an elite-led politics of facts versus a populist politics of feeling. It is between those still committed to public knowledge and public argument and those who profit from the ongoing disintegration of those things.
Who Broke Politics?
As far as anyone can tell, Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House — and the leader of what’s left of the Republican establishment — isn’t racist or authoritarian. He is, however, doing all he can to make a racist authoritarian the most powerful man in the world. Why? Because then he could privatize Medicare and slash taxes on the wealthy.
And that, in brief, tells you what has happened to the Republican Party, and to America.
.. if Hillary Clinton wins nonetheless, they have made it clear that they will try to block any Supreme Court nomination, and there’s already talk of impeachment hearings.
.. When Mrs. Clinton famously spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to undermine her husband’s presidency, she wasn’t being hyperbolic; she was simply describing the obvious reality.
.. Well, when Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1995, he was trying to, guess what, privatize Medicare.
.. Can anything be done to limit the damage? It would help if the media finally learned its lesson, and stopped treating Republican scandal-mongering as genuine news.
Their Dark Fantasies
In reality, murder is at a historic low, we’re seeing a major urban revival and net immigration from Mexico is negative.
.. Mr. Ryan is, of course, a media darling. He doesn’t really command strong support from his own party’s base; his prominence comes, instead, from a press corps that decided years ago that he was the archetype of serious, honest conservatism, and clings to that story no matter how many times the obvious fraudulence and cruelty of his proposals are pointed out.
.. According to him, it’s very grim. There will, he said, be “a gloom and grayness to things,” ruled by a “cold and unfeeling bureaucracy.” We will become a place “where passion — the very stuff of life itself — is extinguished.” And this is the kind of America Mrs. Clinton “will stop at nothing to have.”
.. Gallup finds that 80 percent of Americans are satisfied with their standard of living, up from 73 percent in 2008, and that 55 percent consider themselves to be “thriving,” up from 49 percent in 2008
.. So Mr. Ryan’s vision of America looks nothing like reality. It is, however, completely familiar to anyone who read Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” as a teenager.
.. The people Mr. Trump represents want to suppress and disenfranchise you-know-who; the big-money interests that support Ryan-style conservatism want to privatize and generally dismantle the social safety net, and they’re willing to do whatever it takes to get there.
The App That Wants to Simplify Postal Addresses
A British startup is assigning a unique name to every meter of Earth’s surface. Should addressing systems be universalized—and privatized?
.. Its address doesn’t just tell [you] where it is, but also what road to take to get to the front gate
.. What3Words envisions a universal addressing system, functional in any language, that refers to locations more precisely than street addresses can.
.. its leaders split Earth’s complete land and ocean surface area to 57 trillion three-by-three meter squares. Every individual grid square has a distinctive name, expressed as three words
.. there is no free or open database of how every What3Words address lines up with a GPS coordinate. In fact, charging for access to that database is exactly how the startup What3Words makes money.
.. Mongolia is the least densely populated sovereign nation on the planet.
.. “There’s really no addresses at all for most of the country,” Sheldrick told me.
.. What3Words will provide a national addressing system for Mongolia
.. In the early 2000s, the federal government and other organizations began using these IDs, called DUNS numbers, to organize companies that wanted to bid for contracts.
.. The U.S. government has paid Dun & Bradstreet millions to use the DUNS system.
.. At first, mail was addressed to rural customers only by their name, city, and state. Local postmasters memorized the rest.
.. “It’s only within the last decade that every house has a street address,” says Nancy Pope, a historian at the Smithsonian National Postal Museum. “You end up with these street addresses that are in the tens of thousands, because they’re on a rural road tens of miles from the nearest town.”
.. What3Words addresses are designed to fail catastrophically, and therefore noticeably, Sheldrick told me. A single misplaced letter will never send a package 10 miles in the wrong direction, as a reversed digit in a latitude-longitude coordinate might. Instead, it will send it to another continent.
.. Once inside the ecosystem, its ownership could start extracting rents.
.. But it doesn’t matter if users personally trust Sheldrick or the What3Words team. Intellectual property rights can easily change hands, and they always outlive their owners and their owners’ good intentions.
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This means, for example, that a town is barred by law from releasing a dataset describing when garbage will get picked up where.
The British government is now spending £5 million to rebuild an open version of the exact same postcode registry that it sold off three years ago.