Thinking loud
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ON STATISTICS*
Statistics create subjects; they tell stories and shape cultures.
Over the past five decades, development practitioners have prided
themselves on successfully creating more sophisticated ways to meas-
ure and compare. Statistics have become crucial, if not the most cru-
cial of, development tools. They describe, measure and help to build
the arguments in favor of, or even against, development issues. (For
example, as somebody jokingly said, "smoking is a major cause of sta-
tistics"). Statistics, we are told, reflect economic and social char-
acteristics; they have the power to focus awareness on a range of
problems, deficiencies, challenges and improvements. Of all the de-
velopment tools, it is clear that statistics play the central role in
constructing power and knowledge.
However, statistics are often used unknowingly (?) by development ex-
perts to further entrench the (prevailing) development discourse. The
problematic, potentially biased nature of the statistic in develop-
ment work is given little credence.
One of the cruxes is in the choice of indicators; it always embodies
certain values about what information 'counts' (- "whatever the cakes
we bake are the ones we will have to eat"). For instance, when choos-
ing which data are collected to determine the type and extent of a
given health problem affecting a population, Human Rights principles
and norms can be considered or disregarded. The resulting statistics
will tell a different story altogether.
Further, decisions on how to disaggregate data (by age, gender,
socio-economic, ethnic or other group) also have direct influence on
the policies and programs that are put into place.
While being comforted by the statistic, we remain unaware of how cen-
tral the use of statistics can be to the politics of representation.
Statistics ultimately is a political technology, which can create a
reality that is understood as factual and as a translation of the
truth.
We thus have good reasons to be skeptical (or at least inquisitive)
about statistics; after all, it is notable that the seventeenth cen-
tury term for what is now called statistics was "political arithme-
tic".
Claudio Schuftan
Hanoi, Vietnam
mailto:aviva@netnam.vn
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*: This is partly plagiarized, but I regrettably lost the reference.
Although it is nothing terribly new, I think it is still worth bring-
ing to a higher level of consciousness every now and then. Any dis-
agreements?
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