評論
打印
As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, to serve their cause. But that is an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and need not necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we have witnessed recently.
隨著健康指標、繁榮指標、平等指標、意見指標和生活質量指標使我們逐漸意識到我們是誰、情況是在變好還是在變壞，政治家們也變得嚴重依賴統計數據來鞏固自己的權威。通常情況下他們太過依賴、夸大證據，對數據的解釋過于松散，以致于無法為自己的事業服務。但這是公共生活中數字泛濫的一個不可避免的危險，并不一定會引發我們最近看到的那種對專業知識的全盤否定。
In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on "experts" is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have "lost touch" with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of "seeing like a state", to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their "imagined community" does not exist.
當代民粹主義者對“專家”的攻擊和對民選代表的攻擊在很多方面源自同樣的怨恨。人們認為，在將社會作為一個整體來談論時、在尋求將經濟作為一個整體來治理時，政治家和技術官僚都“迷失”了自己作為一個特定公民的感覺。用無政府主義政治思想家詹姆斯·C·斯科特的話來說，統計學家和政治家都掉進了“看起來像一個國家”的陷阱。科學地談論國家——例如從宏觀經濟學的角度——是對那些更愿意依靠記憶和敘述來獲得民族認同感的人的侮辱，他們厭倦了別人告訴他們“想象中的社區”并不存在。
On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?
另一方面，統計數據(以及民選代表)在幾十年甚至幾百年的時間里在支持可信的公眾話語方面發揮了足夠的作用。那么它改變了什么？
The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.
統計危機并不像看上去那么突然。在大約450年的時間里，統計學家的偉大成就在于將國家人口的復雜性和流動性降低為易于管理、易于理解的事實和數據。然而，近幾十年來，由于20世紀60年代出現的文化政治以及此后不久開始的全球經濟重塑，世界發生了巨大變化，目前還不清楚統計學家們是否一直與這些變化保持同步。傳統的統計分類和定義形式正受到越來越不穩定的身份、態度和經濟路徑的壓力。用簡單、公認的指標來代表人口、社會和經濟變化的做法正在失去其合法性。
