Ultimately, I feel this headline ("Statistics have lost their power," in case the Guardian changes it later) buries the lede. The dispute is not really about s

Ultimately, I feel this headline ("Statistics have lost their power," in case the Guardian changes it later) buries the lede. The dispute is not really about statistics as a way of understanding the world, it is about the epistemology of it, and at its core the idea that a national aggregate is a valid proxy for well-being. It's easy to decry: > Presented with official estimates of how many immigrants are in the country illegally, a common response is to scoff. Far from increasing support for immigration, British Future found, pointing to its positive effect on GDP can actually make people more hostile to it. ... but the underlying belief appears to be closer to: > If you live in one of the towns in the Welsh valleys that was once dependent on steel manufacturing or mining for jobs, politicians talking of how “the economy” is “doing well” are likely to breed additional resentment. From that standpoint, the term “GDP” fails to capture anything meaningful or credible. The first statement makes no sense in and of itself, and it would seemingly suggest a knee-jerk reaction against the very idea of data. However, in the context provided by the second statement we see a different view: a core distrust that "average well-being" (represented by the statistic of choice) in fact represents the common good, suitably defined[1]. As a result, I feel that the article's later musings -- that we're merely collecting the wrong kind of statistics -- misses the core point. If we start reporting on underemployment, then the right circumstances might come along to discredit that indicator, and so on. The article begins to grapple with this issue in its digression into big data (and how there are no national agencies for it in the manner of the ONS), but even there the author deals with a practical problem of said data being more useful in the short term than long term than the core problem: Ultimately, if society as a whole does not have a shared view of the 'common good', then _no quantity at all_ can measure it. The question of "is this good?" becomes fundamentally unanswerable in a democracy with an identity crisis. [1] -- That could mean "median well-being," "well-being of people I know / in my region / like me," or "personal, individual well-being of the speaker."