What numbers can’t do!

Tony Blair usually kept his calm and charismatic face in front of the crowd. But in April 2005, it was clearly seen that the encounter with a lady from one of the London TV studios had completely messed him up. During his eight-year tenure as British Prime Minister, Blair had a mission to improve the level of public health services. At that time, everyone’s voice was heard that it was not possible to get an appointment from the doctors in an acceptable time frame; Patients were often told that they would have to wait a few weeks for the first available appointment. Blair’s government decided to set a goal to solve this problem: financial incentives will be considered for doctors who attend the patient within 48 hours of the request.

This plan seemed logical. But that day the audience was aware of a problem that was hidden from the eyes of Blair and his government. While the interview was being broadcast live on television, Diana Church calmly explained to the Prime Minister that her son’s doctor had asked to see them sometime next week, yet the clinic had told them it could accommodate their request up to 48 hours in advance of the appointment. register Because otherwise the doctors there will be deprived of that reward. If Church wanted to make an appointment with her son’s doctor for the next week, she had to wait until the day before and then call at 8 am and wait in line for a long time. Before the establishment of incentives, doctors could not give an earlier time; After that, they didn’t want to wait any longer.

▪︎ The host asked: You didn’t know?
▪︎Blair replied: I did not know.
▪︎ The presenter turned to the audience and asked: Has anyone else had this experience?

A riot broke out. Protests erupted, Blair fell into tête-à-tête and a nation watched as their leader lost control over a common problem called miscalculation.

○Blair and his advisers were not the first to have good intentions in their goals but to get into trouble because of those goals. Whenever you try to force the real world to do something that can be measured by numbers, you will run into many unintended consequences.

The mistake that Tony Blair and his policy-making team made is so common that it has become proverbial: a useful number loses its usefulness when it becomes a measure of success. This is known as Goodhart’s law. This law reminds us that measuring the human world can change its direction.

Deborah Stone writes in her book that in the Soviet Union, production quotas were set for factories and farms, so that people’s jobs and livelihoods depended on the fulfillment of these quotas. Textile mills were required to produce a certain amount of fabric, which was determined by length, and as a result many looms were set to produce long but narrow strips of fabric.
The performance of Uzbek cotton pickers was measured based on the weight of the harvested product. So they soaked cotton in water to make it heavier.

Similarly, when the first nationwide railroad was built in the United States in the 1860s, contractors were paid by the mile. Therefore, a section of the railroad around Omaha and Nebraska was built in a large arc instead of running in a straight line, adding several miles of unnecessary (but profitable) track to the railroad.

Harford quotes prominent psychologist Daniel Kahneman as explaining in his book Thinking Fast and Slow that when we are faced with a difficult question we tend to replace it with a simple one, usually unconsciously. . Examples of this can be seen in the questions that the community is trying to answer using data.

One of the prominent examples is the school. We may worry about whether our children are getting a good education at school. But the problem is that we cannot define exactly what we mean by “appropriate”. Instead, we turn to a related, albeit simpler, question: How does our student perform on a particular test, which is taken from only a portion of the body of reality? And thus we get caught in the pitiful “studying for the test” syndrome.

Another example of this issue is the use of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index to determine the economic status of a country. According to this index, if a school teacher assaults one of his students and is transferred to a maximum security prison for that reason, he will contribute more to the economic success of his country than if he teaches that student. If that teacher goes to jail, a lot of jobs will be created.

○ Just change a question in a questionnaire, even a small change, and see how everything changes. About 25 years ago in Uganda, the labor force suddenly increased by more than 10 percent, from 6.5 million to 7.2 million. This increase was due to a change in the wording of the labor force questionnaire. Before that, people were asked to declare their main activity or job, but in the new version of the questionnaire, people were asked to mention the secondary roles they have as well. Thus, suddenly, hundreds of thousands of Ugandan women, whose main occupation was homemaking but who also spent many hours doing other work, were added to the overall statistics.

In order to be able to put the world in the form of numbers, we have to reduce it to the extent necessary, and this means discarding a large amount of details. These unavoidable omissions can bias the data for certain groups of people. The United Nations once tried to develop guidelines for measuring the level of violence against women.

□ Representatives from Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand expressed their views on the type of violence that should be included in these guidelines. Their opinions were based on survey research conducted on victims in their own countries. The suggested items were punching, kicking, biting, slapping, pushing, beating and squeezing the throat.

Meanwhile, a number of Bangladeshi women suggested that other forms of violence should be included – practices that are not uncommon on the Indian subcontinent – such as burning women, throwing acid on them, throwing them from heights and forcing them to sleep. In the animal pen.

○ None of these were included in the final list. Therefore, when a survey research is conducted based on the guidelines of the United Nations, few findings will be obtained about women who are exposed to this type of violence.
“Numbers always tell the truth, except when they lie.”