How things went wrong
1945 marks the end of a glorious period in the history of statistics and probability as intellectual disciplines for the machinery of government. In the final years of that period, the war-time Ministry of Supply used the power of direction of labour at Churchill’s dictate to set up the statistical research group SR17 with the initial remit of training war industries & munitions factories in the techniques of quality control. It was led by George Barnard and accommodated a band of freshly graduated Cambridge mathematicians. They included Peter Armitage, Dennis Lindley and Robin Plackett. Other sorts of war-work were done by George Box at Porton Down, David Cox at the Royal Aircraft Establishment and Henry Daniels at the Ministry of Aircraft Production. These individuals went on to fuel the development of statistical reasoning in the post-war decades. It may have been in their war-work that they discovered the contribution that R. A. Fisher had fortuitously anticipated in 1925 with Statistical Methods for Research Workers and The Design of Experiments 10 years later.
One week before the Hiroshima bomb, I walked with my much older brother-in-law Ernest Nutter around the ICT-Nobel explosives factory in Ayrshire. One of his chores was to warn site-cleaners not to use a pick to remove TNT from the walkway that had spilled over from overhead ducts and solidified. Nutt’s first war job had been at the Windscale plutonium factory. It may have been in these factories that he acquired the official booklet that simplified the Fisherian methods, just as Box may have done at Porton Down. When he saw where I was heading, he generously gave me the Fisher books and the light-yellow booklet I no longer possess.
1945 was also the year in which PPE graduate Harold Wilson became an MP. His biographer Ben Pimlott wrote that his degree had ‘alphas on every paper’. There will have been more Statistics in the Economics of PPE than was needed to justify the slide-rule I saw Wilson wave when he spoke in Lancaster town hall in the 1950 election campaign. Throughout his life, he was happy to be called ‘statistician’ especially when president of the Royal Statistical Society in 1972. The manifesto that got him into Number Ten in 1964 promised to harness “our national wealth in brains, our genius for scientific invention and medical discovery; reversing the decline of the thirteen wasted years”.
Whatever the quality of the ‘brains’ that Labour identified, it was not enough to reverse the economic decline whose nadir was the £4bn WMF loan, after Wilson had resigned in a state of mental confusion. That there was no parallel decline in government statistics over the same period was because Wilson had picked out one ‘brain’, namely Claus Moser, to be head of the Central Statistical Office. (Another of his foresights was to keep Britain out of the Vietnam War.) But neither Wilson nor Moser could restrain the burgeoning econometric hubris of the period. The first thing out of the Pandora’s box was a simple health authority funding formula developed by health minister Crossman at the tail-end of the first Wilson government. The trouble with the Crossman formula is that it was a subjective judgement so that by 1974 there was a plethora of countrywide objections. The new health minister Dr David Owen had to decide what to do with Brian Abel-Smith’s idea that the resource allocation problem might be resolved by a randomised trial of different funding methods for the then 205 district health authorities. In his 2013 book, Walter Holland recalled Owen rejecting the idea in favour of making per capita allocation proportional to the morbidity index SMR. If Owen had been less fearful of the scorn that Fisherian randomisation would get from MPs, the future shape of area-based funding might have been more salubrious. The long-lasting legacy of Rayner, Thatcher and Rothschild was that resource allocation formulas became a profitable hunting ground for health economists and their Department of Health recruiters. We are still living with the costly consequences of their neglect of statistical reasoning and principles, but until 1989 I was unaware that things had gone so wrong with the Statistics of government departments.
Major cases of failure
The ‘water privatisation‘ section of Failing to Figure is an account of the first case in which I became aware of the state of statistical reasoning in government. At the time, I was flattered to be asked by the Binnie engineering company (commissioned by the Department of Environment via the Director General of Water Services) to vet statistical work of such import. It was a huge and technically complex job beyond the competence of the DG & DoE and stretching that of Binnie, but I did not question the machinery of government that farmed it out to a single statistician to do in his spare time.
Light on road accidents: My next experience was a happier one. It was a direct engagement in 1996 by Department of Transport civil servants to help Transport Research Laboratory analyse 10 years of road accidents to discover whether changing the clocks to European time would save lives. The finding that it probably would was reported in the Guardian with the political slant that “allocating light … was a ripe subject for devolution”. The civil servants were unswerving in their desire to see it as a purely scientific study which they did in a Series A paper. Their only deviation was when I broke protocol by writing directly to a Scottish statistician about a technical issue. The letter was intercepted and binned before it got to him—out of respect for the political sensitivity of Scottish Secretary Michael Forsyth!
The Spottiswoode Report: Questioning the machinery of government had to wait until I got an email near the end of the millennium from a Treasury civil servant worried about a Treasury/Home Office proposal to use the fashionable econometric technique Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to rank the productivities of England’s 43 police forces. All I can add to the account of DEA in ‘getting the measure of the police‘ section of Failing to Figure is a little background colour. The Treasury whistle-blower spoke powerfully at an ad hoc meeting of the Official Statistics Section, while I distributed a long critique that became Public Money & Management and Series A publications in 2002. The Home Office civil servants who attended may have returned to their offices in Petty France with an unwelcome message for the senior economist—but only one of them was eventually shot for doing so (perhaps a necessary sacrifice for the new Home Secretary Blunkett).
What next? How could I stop HO implementing the report already published as the product of a PA Consulting partner Clare Spottiswoode? Learning that she was a mathematician and noting her reluctance to be considered its author, I naively placed my hopes on showing her how defective it was. She agreed to meet me at 123 Buckingham Palace Rd. But the meeting was pointless since it was joined by none other than the HO senior economist, who may have seen me as a loose cannon.
Memories are fading of how the whole issue ended. I do remember an abortive sticky-bun lunch in a crowded airless room high up in the Broadway building, which provoked demands for a better venue and lunch for the next gathering. So it was in a grand Russell Square hotel that a post-prandial relaxed audience got the point of a counter-example in which I showed that DEA would separate the 22 goats from the 21 sheep in a group of 43 animals treated as productive entities. I have a clear memory of a suddenly revealed division of opinion about DEA, between two key figures seated next to each other, one from HO, the other from HMT. I think that was when DEA met the buffers.
Neglecting the reality of ‘regression to the mean’: PA Consulting bungled another case, the one described in the ‘speed cameras—the truth!’ section of Failing to Figure. Appendix C of the UCL research report of the Today programme’s speed-camera tribunal records how PricewaterhouseCoopers had ignored the reality underlying Galton’s discovery of ‘regression to the mean’ in its pre-millennial research for the Home Office about whether speed cameras save lives. It is hardly surprising that PA Consulting blindly reproduced the error. For one who admires the genius of Francis Galton, it was upsetting to be told by DfT’s chief scientific advisor (a distinguished professor of statistics) that I had damaged the road safety programme by involvement in the Today tribunal. I responded with a Civitas piece and with an unpublished piece provoked by an aborted recording for a Five Live broadcast about an M4 camera protest.
The 5000 to 13000 story: The DfT advisor’s rebuke was a small thing compared to the truly upsetting academic scorn for my ‘political incorrectness’ in acting as potential whistle-blower advisor to Migration Watch, especially on the case described in the ‘figures of fancy‘ section of Failing to Figure and a UCL research report. The latter was my 2003 analysis for Migration Watch of the key chapter of the UCL report for the Home Office on the impact of EU enlargement on migration flows, clearly authored by two Germans (under the ‘direction’ of Christian Dustmann) with whom I made friendly academic contact. When the borders opened up for the AC10 countries in 2004, I was contacted by David Green who wanted to publicise my analysis with a Civitas press release. Unduly flattered, I overlooked the phrase ‘serious technical errors’ which, being in the public arena, offended Professor Dustman who then declined to attend the departmental seminar at which I explained the errors—which the Mail on Sunday was unable to do. My last work for Migration Watch was to refine a Department of Work & Pensions fit of the relationship between a country’s per capita GDP and the proportion applying for work permits. Applied to Bulgaria and Romania, the better fit of the DWP data gave a central prediction much larger than the DWP-predicted proportion. I have not unearthed the ONS figures to see what transpired after the 2007 accession.
The endless NHS funding story: The Department of Health (DH) had been abusing statistical reasoning for many years before I got to know about it, when invited by Joan Davis, chairman of The Community Voice, to comment in Autumn 2003 on Hillingdon PCT’s Annual Public Health Report: Focus on Health Inequalities. Health Director Hillary Pickles appears to have been influenced by a fearful picture in DH’s document Tackling Health Inequalities: A Programme for Action. The picture did not actually lie but demonstrated how to mislead by using ill-understood mortality indices—in this case the SMR that David Owen had introduced. Pickles took it to mean that “as the health of the nation has improved overall, the rich have improved their health faster than the poor”. By April 2004, Jane Galbraith and I had submitted a paper to Series A that explained how Pickles had misunderstood the picture, before demolishing the pretensions of the then PCT funding formula. I sent the paper to DH’s ‘head of profession’ for Statistics, John Fox, who generously squeezed me onto the programme he was organising for the September RSS conference. Did he do that to balance a failure to stop DH abusing SMR in the fearful picture?
At Manchester, I bemoaned the accumulation of governmental abuses of Statistics, and continued the lament for months in a UCL research report, a paper in Public Money & Management, a Civitas report, an invited paper in Municipal Engineer and an analysis of the gross abuse of the PCT funding formula I heard from the lips of NW London SHA’s CE at a Community Voice meeting. All rather desperate! With slowly reviving hopes, I submitted written evidence to the imminent Health Committee inquiry into PCT deficits. Two pages of supplementary evidence were needed to explain how the oral evidence of DH’s director of finance & investment got things wrong about whether deprivation had more influence on the allocation formula than age-profile. For the oral grilling, I had the warm support of health economist Sheena Asthana but also had to sit next to DH’s chief economic adviser, whose abysmal ignorance of statistics is documented on two pages of Failing to Figure. However neither written nor oral evidence had as much immediate impact as the unsigned graphs tabled by an obliging secretariat beforehand, when they caught the sharp eye of the independent MP Richard Taylor (a retired hospital doctor).
My irritation at the failure of the Health Committee to recognise the central role of statistical reasoning in their considerations is reflected in the title “We are the DoH, this is what we do” of a review of the three committee publications. (Allegedly drunk in the back of a taxi, Richard Chartres had defended his condition by telling bystanders “I am the bishop of London, this is what I do.”) The irritation may have blinded me to the DH publication of a proposed major change of the PCT formula (from ‘AREA’ to ‘CARAN’)—until I was able to refute its statistical logic two years later in a UCL research report and a Royal Statistical Society discussion paper with Jane Galbraith.
One month before the 2010 general election, Civitas posted Formulas at War —an account of how minister Ben Bradshaw had in effect ‘cut and pasted’ CARAN to stop the PCT allocations becoming more favourable to Tory constituencies. Formulas at War also covers in detail the occasion in Portcullis house when I joined Sheena Asthana and Matt Sutton to give evidence about AREA to the Rural Services All Party Parliamentary Group. (Sutton was the health economist who had headed the Scottish team that gave Department of Health finance department bits of AREA.) The occasion raised hopes that Sheena and I were at last making contact (I was congratulated by someone I took to be the Duke of Montrose who told me I had done UCL proud). Those hopes were dashed with words that came down the line to chairman Graham Stuart MP in response to an up-the line query as to whether my technical advice was needed: “We’ll come to you if we lose the election, but if we win we’ll be doing our own statistics.”
Perhaps those words were not as cynical as they sound, but related to a developing ‘person-based resource allocation (PBRA)’ approach that surfaced in 2011 in a BMJ paper for which there is a link in a short Civitas note. The Nuffield Trust approach was quickly rejected in a Civitas research report. Years earlier, DH had asked me to assess six proposals of PBRA research. The best was from Sheena Asthana and the second best from a ‘PBRA Team’—the subset of the 11 BMJ authors that fulfilled the research contract. The 11 BMJ credits were for handling 50 million GP-registered individuals each with a record as long as your arm—a task argued as sensible by Matt Sutton in his oral evidence to RSAPPG. It is ironic that such effort was expended to produce a formula that can be seen to be nonsensical even when applied to CCGs rather than GP practices, rejecting the idea of carefully collecting better quality data from a much smaller stratified random sample of individuals.
The welcome given to the BMJ paper provoked a futile volley of three Civitas reports in 2013. The first identified the spurious explanations of the defenders of the unexpected sign of some large coefficients in the PBRA3 formula. The second tried to disturb the complacency of the new health secretary and the chairman of ACRA. The third was probably too polemical to have any influence (its reference to the second should have been to the report that rejected the BMJ paper). In desperation in 2013, I asked a contact in Public Health England (just founded in Wellington House) if I could give one of the lunchtime seminars he organised. For an audience that included one or two from NHS England, I presented two hours of technical argument and slides. The September NHS England workshop in the basement of the Marriott Hotel was where I failed to get NHS England’s finance analyst Michael Chaplin to acknowledge the PBRA3 nonsense but was allowed to distribute copies of the draft of a Civitas report that proved the nonsense.
A Public Money & Management paper and a fuller Civitas report reveal by regression analysis how misguided was the outrage expressed by Parliamentary Accounts Committee chairman in her 2014 hearing of a National Audit Office report that may have been designed to embarrass NHS England’s CE Simon Stevens. Margaret Hodge was angry at the shortfall of some CCG allocations (including that of her own constituency) that NAO had revealed in a striking graph of a positive correlation between the plus-and-minus shortfall variable and the end-of-year accountancy deficit. Ever optimistic, I assumed the committee would welcome written evidence that it was going off the rails of statistical truth. But I got no acknowledgement of my finding that the correlation probably reflects CCG commissioners’ efforts to avoid embarrassing deficits or surpluses, more than anything fundamental.
The finance directors of each of the 211 CCGs get to know well before the start of each financial year what their per-head allocation (A, say) is to be for that year, as well as the corresponding target value (T, say). If S denotes the shortfall variable, the model used in the regression analysis takes S to be linearly related to A and T, and thinks of the scatter plot of 211 values of (A, T) as the outcome of independent historical processes. The revealing expression fitted by least-squares is S=a+bF+cD where F=(A+T)/2 and D=A-T (the so-called ‘distance from target’). Note that when the books are balanced, the average of D is approximately zero and can therefore be seen as a perturbation of an approximate mean a+bF. The remarkable finding that the estimate of c is statistically insignificant is reproduced in an analysis of the second year of CCG data. It is also powerfully confirmed by the estimates for 26 performance indicators in NHS’s impressive Atlas of Variation.
All of which explains why NAO would not have found significant correlations between D and the CCG performances it chose to look at, even if it had used per-head data instead of the raw data (affected by noisome variations in thec size of CCG populations). An impressive technical guide kept the influence of PBRA3 on CCG allocations going well beyond the first two years 2013-2015. My own efforts to dampen that influence have run into the ground despite an online opinion piece in Public Finance, an appeal to the Board of Hillingdon CCG and a letter to Boris Johnson covering a complaint to Jeremy Hunt that rudely questions Treasury logic.
Granny wouldn’t be so daft: Both the message and the humour of the cake-cutting metaphor in the section Local government lunacy of Failing to Figure was appreciated by several reviewers. My broad but rather technical assessment of the countrywide effect of the Wokingham perturbation envisaged by Asthana and Gibson was published by CIPFA, courtesy of three no-doubt horror-struck editors.
The Police funding debacle: Before I could extricate myself from the health formula issue, an entertaining inanity emerged in July 2015 from the Home Office (as if to compete with the memory of the Spottiswoode Report). This was a proposal for funding the 43 police forces of England and Wales, to which responses were invited. It had no named authors, only an enthusiastic endorsement by Theresa May. My response is in the Appendix of a long note whose title became that of a short Public Finance Opinion published on the day of the House of Commons debacle described in another Opinion. Too late, I came across a reference (in the otherwise worthless House of Commons Library briefing note) to a perceptive Police Foundation document objecting to the ‘opaqueness’ of the Home Office’s ‘advanced statistical techniques’. My Mac still has an incomplete document whose ‘How not to…’ title suggests it may have been written for submission to Series A for when that journal will accept the kind of paper it once rejected. Reference to the Mac recalls a vivid memory of the desktop arrow being moved around by an invisible agency to entangle one set of icons after another (presumably to copy them, without overt stealing) not long after I had been in contact with the Police Federation.
More econometric magic from UCL: In November 2013, a UCL press release induced much of the media to give a warm coverage of the Dustmann & Frattini report The Fiscal Effects of Immigration to the EU as proof that opening the borders to Eastern Europe had been a multibillion benefit to the Treasury. My detailed econometric rebuttal came with a Civitas press release that alleged “schoolboy errors” in the UCL report. A D&F response reprimanded Civitas for the allegation but left my arguments relatively unscathed. So another Civitas report had to strengthen the arguments by giving technical support to Robert Rowthorn’s Civitas book Large-scale Immigration: Its economic and demographic consequences for the UK (one element of the support was worked out in a Civitas note). It is regrettable that, once misinformed, media tend to stay misinformed. I still hear from time to time vague reference to a 19 billions benefit but not one to the evidence that the true bottom line is almost certainly in the red.
A mixed bag of peripheral concerns
The question of trust: In her fifth Reith lecture Licence to deceive, Baroness Onora O’Neill sagely questioned the arrogance of Whitehall in its management of public services:
Do we really gain from heavy-handed forms of accountability? Do we really benefit from indiscriminate demands for transparency? I am unconvinced. I think we may undermine professional performance and standards in public life by excessive regulation, and that we may condone and even encourage deception in our zeal for transparency.
Fired up by painful-to-read documents my councillor wife was bringing home in 2002, I got a paper into Public Money & Management about two of the guilty quangos—the Audit Commission and the Commission for Racial Equality (headed by the soon-disgraced Gurbux Singh). It describes the avalanche of performance indicators and pious targets that smothered the activities Solveig would have to oversee in her forthcoming duties for Education. O’Neill would say that we should trust teachers to respond to pressures from the society they serve more than those that come out of Whitehall.
‘Weighting and scoring’ in theory and in practice: That was the title of a 2007 publication from a heavily revised draft that may have helped in Joan Davis’s and mine defeat of the Strategic Health Authority proposal to move the Mount Vernon Cancer Centre to Hatfield. It exposes the illogicality of an opaque technique forcefully recommended by the Treasury Green Book.
A defective official poll card: The Hillingdon poll card for the 2006 local elections was of a new design with four pages by folding the card, rather than the usual two, the front and back. The extra pages contained gratuitous information responding to Minister Harriet Harman’s call for greater encouragements to vote. Sitting as a ‘teller’ outside a polling station, I had time to notice with another teller a colourful feature of page 3 that could bias the voting against the Lib Dems. I wrote a piece about it and, as a courtesy showed it to my wife (candidate for another party) before advertising it. It may have got no further than the Electoral Commission.
Sabine women rule, OK? : The Civitas report based on my going to a Hayes cultural event in 2007 was coloured by the well-informed conversation I had heard at Migration Watch lunches of knowledgeable adjudicators of appeals against refusal of asylum status by the Home Office—and by what I heard of a different nature from Maeve Sherlock (and two other women speakers) at a Centre for Policy Studies seminar about immigration numbers (by then at their height). I would not now be so rude as I then was—to table copies of the New Yorker cartoon that shows the Sabine women winking to each other as they are carried off by muscular horsemen.
Stirring a volatile pot from IPPR/EHRC in 2009: If I had known the pot was ready to boil over, I need not have tried to generate interest in a piece by putting ‘BNP’ in the title. Four hours after its Civitas release, it was blogged by James Delingpole; next day the Daily Express reported it as Storm over ‘Myth’ that migrants jump queue; next were the British National Party (used to being beaten), Nigel Hawkes (who had missed the key comparison when the EHRC report came out) and, topping the bill, a page in The Spectator by Rod Liddle—which led to a contact by Spectator editor Fraser Nelson expressing an interest in employing a statistician, for which I recommended Nigel Williams whose contact with Fraser was however abortive, leaving Nigel free to join and thrive in Civitas. I milked the storm with a letter to the Telegraph that was picked up by Migration Watch and reproduced for obvious reason.
David Green asked the UK Statistics Authority to assess the quality of IPPR/EHRC’s statistical claims, and thereby elicited an interesting response. Chairman Sir Michael Scholar declined to make any judgement on the grounds that it would be outside their remit claiming that “our role relates to the production, presentation and … the use of official statistics but not to the quality of social research based on the statistics, unless this were to involve a specific misrepresentation of the statistics themselves.”
In memoriam: Andrew Dennis was the Migration Watch de facto statistician who had inhaled enough asbestos dust to give him the cruel death of mesothelioma in 2008. I used his last piece of work, Balanced Migration, as ammunition in the Durham Debate at the start of my unending campaigning on the issues Solveig had bequeathed in the same year. A 2010 Civitas report is a technical rebuttal of the bits of a book by two University of Manchester sociologists that attribute mythical status to reports to which Dennis must have contributed. I had just reviewed the book in the issue of Significance that honoured me with one of its ‘leading statistician’ interviews—an issue that also had a favourable review of Failure to Figure by David Finney. From that year, however, my emails to editor Champkin were not even acknowledged—perhaps offence had been taken that the interview had not revealed my non-PC connection to Migration Watch.
Florence Nightingale: Solveig and I used to enjoy poring over volumes in the well-stocked Wellcome Library. I have a vivid memory of her exploring other aisles while I looked through the 14-or-so volumes of Lynn McDonald’s biography of Florence Nightingale. Years earlier, we had tandemed into the forecourt of FN’s family ‘seat’, Lea Hurst. Lynn had only one reference to my entry with Marion Diamond into the world of FN scholarship—a bald footnote that there are errors, some substantial, in the transcription. Politely challenged after my unsolicited contribution to the Royal Statistical Society’s FN celebration (in the third bundle of collected papers), I was given a handful of insubstantial errors. I still do not know why my participation has been ignored by omnivorous Nightingale scholars or why Significance rejected an analysis of FN’s body-and-soul sickness in The Owl and the Nightingale—if it was not my connection to Migration Watch.
Financial Transaction Tax: The Civitas report Doing the Maths in Political Villages was provoked by a Hansard account of the House of Lords EU Subcommittee A hearing of 16 Feb 2012. It ended with a question of whether the subcommittee had the expertise to resolve or even progress the FTT issue, but on the way it wanders into playful historical territory. The URL in the report does not now bring up the play I wrote about the high-frequency trading (HFT) that makes a case for FTT, but its title Acronym Stew does. The Lords subcommittee chewed on the HFT bone two years later after a false start with questions to Anthony Browne (turncoat from a Civitas allegiance in 2002). My July 2014 Civitas report ends with comment on Lord Lawson’s contribution to this regrettably ineffective HFT debate and a compensatory contribution to an informative book by a French policeman.
A three-number variant of the two-number 2020Tax proposal: Letting personal allowance vary sinuously with gross income, you can get a piece-wise linear effective tax-rate of 0% up to £10k (say), a flat 30% (say) over £60k (say). This bundle of pieces owes much to the discriminating help of Nigel Williams. For this piece, look at the graphs to see how he has shown what three parameters can do.
A sad tale on the back of the Higher Education bill: The two Ss in the title of this all-guns-blazing review of how things went wrong in government departments are in Sociology and Statistics. It was rather accidentally submitted to the Open Democracy journal financed by billionaire George Soros but fortunately rejected. With the HE bill making progress in November 2016, another piece was submitted and rejected as a Public Finance Opinion. So Jo Johnson rules pro tem!
Trident on the cheap: Deterrence on a pittance is more rage than rag (at the bottom of the bag) in its (unsuccessful) effort to resuscitate the Public Finance connection. With that platform now moribund along with Civitas, we must (if you are by now ‘with’ me, dear reader) put hopes in a Royal Statistical Society that more clearly embodies the social conscience of its founders.
How to do things better:
From pp. 63-64 of Failing to Figure … “here are six suggestions for how to reconstruct or recondition the machinery:
- Consult widely in the early stages of an uncertain project. Solicit the views of separately active individuals or groups likely to have divergent opinions (e.g. economists and statisticians) well before any attempt is made to specify an invitation to tender.[i] At this stage, discord may be highly informative which the later competitive tendering arrangements (financially valuable contracts) could not reasonably be expected to be.
- Be prepared to extract the informative value of any discordant opinions from those thus solicited. Discord is a likely outcome when the realities of any complex issue are searchingly addressed. For cases where the disagreement is between two well-argued and persuasive approaches and where the costs of outside expertise are small compared with the financial risk of a misguided policy or defective formula, be prepared to back competing research teams.[ii]
- Enlarge Haldane’s legacy by restoring the pre-1960s balance between economists and statisticians in order to get greater prominence for the statistical-thinking component of forethought.
- Use publication to curtail the ministerial practice of claiming confidentiality for advice received from advisory committees that the minister claims to be ‘independent’.
- Publish on paper or web-site all advice obtained from external consultation, whether paid for or not.
- Publish the winning tender along with the departmental reasoning for its acceptance.
England has enough civil service talent to effect a step change in the quality of policy-making. In other words, the generalists’ grey matter can do it, provided they can shake off their ministerial incubus. We need not wait for departments to become Sir Christopher Foster’s ‘centres of excellence’—a transition that might well have to await changes in our genetic pool. In the short run, the important genes are not those that enhance intelligence but those deeper atavistic ones from our simian origins that feed social Darwinian behaviour i.e. survival of the fittest. A simple change in the definition of ‘fittest’ would work wonders for policy-making: the fittest civil servants would be rewarded for employing their endowed intelligence in accordance with the high standards inscribed on Foster’s fourteen pillars. That change can only come about when Parliament asserts its authority to determine the framework in which the ‘public interest’―which is nothing more than defence of the citizenry against the arrogance of a ruling class—can be guaranteed.”
- A lighter ‘brain-storming’ might be useful. In the early stages of any forethought, experts should be kept apart to maximise their independence, their number should be greatly enlarged and individually motivated to offer a disinterested opinion by, for example, a contribution to their organisation’s tea-club.
- The idea had a grander scale for Maynard Keynes:
‘It will be remembered that the seventy translators of the Septuagint were shut up in seventy separate rooms with the Hebrew text and brought out with them, when they emerged, seventy identical translations. Would the same miracle have been vouchsafed if seventy multiple correlators were shut up with the same statistical material?’ from Economics Journal, Vol. 50, 1940, p. 154.
Would that that had been done for two groups of health economists in the early Nineties!
[i] A lighter ‘brain-storming’ might be useful. In the early stages of any forethought, experts should be kept apart to maximise their independence, their number should be greatly enlarged and individually motivated to offer a disinterested opinion by, for example, a contribution to their organisation’s tea-club.
[ii] The idea had a grander scale for Maynard Keynes :
‘It will be remembered that the seventy translators of the Septuagint were shut up in seventy separate rooms with the Hebrew text and brought out with them, when they emerged, seventy identical translations. Would the same miracle have been vouchsafed if seventy multiple correlators were shut up with the same statistical material?’ from Economics Journal, Vol. 50, 1940, p. 154. Would that that had been done for two groups of health economists in the early Nineties!
Acknowledgement
Here and there but far from everywhere, this bundle of naively optimistic pieces owes a great deal to my colleagues J. I. Galbraith, R. F. Galbraith and A. P. Dawid.
Whitehall's neglect of statistical reasoning since 1945 