Stubborn facts, pliable statistics
Editorial-January 16, 2014,
The Opposition has flayed the government for cooking up statistics to produce impressive indicators and paint a rosy picture of the socio-economic situation in the country. It has got hold of something to beat the ruling UPFA with. The kneejerk reaction of government worthies and their economists has been to pooh-pooh the allegation and vilify their detractors, critics and doubters.
The practice of cooking up statistics is not of recent origin. It is as old as politics. Any government wants statistics to do what Humpty Dumpty expects words to; they should mean what it chooses them to mean—neither more nor less. It is said that facts are stubborn and statistics pliable.
Statistics, cooked up or otherwise, and indicators based thereon are rather deceptive, to say the least. We are in a situation where the official inflation rate has come down drastically, but prices have gone into the stratosphere! Prof. Aaron Levenstein has famously said, ‘Statistics are like bikinis; what they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." How true!
As for misleading economic indicators, the per capita income is a case in point. Economists, as is the practice all over the world, divide, with a generous hand, the national income—most of which the super rich account for—among all citizens including the poorest of the poor. Worse, vital policy decisions that affect the lives of the ordinary people are made on the basis of this figure which is made out to be the average income. The same goes for the so-called poverty line and the like. Unfortunately, we have to use them for want of a better alternative.
Politicians, either in government or out of power, cannot be expected to tell us the truth about anything. Lies, damned lies, statistics—and politics! Those trying to retain power by hook or by crook and their rivals desperate to gain it at any cost never see eye to eye on anything. Two dogs at the same bone seldom agree, as they say. So, what politicians tell us about an issue is not to be taken as the truth blindly. Time was when the SLFP ridiculed the late President Ranasinghe Premadasa’s Jana Saviya as a farce and rubbished the statistics the then government flaunted in a bid to bolster his claim that his poverty alleviation programme was a huge success. But, today, the same programme continues under a different name with some cosmetic changes, and the SLFP-led UPFA claims it to be a success!
However, it behoves the government to clear serious doubts that the Opposition has cast on its much flaunted statistical data and indicators if it is to prevent further erosion of public confidence therein. The JVP has called for the appointment of a Parliamentary Select Committee (PSC) to probe the accuracy of socio-economic data dished out by state institutions. Its right to make such a demand cannot be questioned, but we thought it had no faith in the PSC process after the controversial impeachment of Chief Justice Dr. Shirani Bandaranayake! Given the composition of the current Parliament, even if a PSC were to be appointed by any chance on the government’s economic indicators etc, it would be packed with UPFA MPs and the purpose lost.
The government cannot have any difficulty in making the process of preparing its socio-economic indicators transparent and keeping it open to scrutiny by independent experts if it is confident of the accuracy of its claims and has nothing to hide. It should be able to say, "Come and see!" Trotting out lame excuses and branding its critics as traitors won’t do.
