What is the value of high-quality, trustworthy official statistics? Given the number of things that statistical agencies measure, we might expect that they have attempted to put a number on this too. In fact, they have often been rather coy. A UN report, “Promoting, Measuring and Communicating the Value of Official Statistics”, published in 2018, was packed with qualitative ideas about how statistics were useful: they were said to build trust in government, improve decision-making, promote equality and “help us understand who we are, have been and are becoming”. All reasonable enough, but cost-benefit analysis was thin on the ground.
A cynic might suggest this near silence speaks volumes. Maybe official statistics have little value? That was the radical view of Sir John Cowperthwaite, who was the financial secretary of Hong Kong throughout the 1960s, when it was a rapidly growing, laissez-faire British colony. Cowperthwaite thought the value of official statistics wasn’t merely minimal, but negative: he told the economist Milton Friedman that he didn’t collect economic data, because it would only encourage the Whitehall variety of mandarin to interfere.
In context, Cowperthwaite’s position was understandable: few economies were more at risk of clumsy meddling than Hong Kong, a colonial possession pursuing a libertarian path on the opposite side of the world from soft-left imperial rulers. Still, there are at least two weaknesses in his argument. The first is the hope that ignorance might restrain the interventionist impulses of governments. It might simply make those interventionist impulses clumsier. The second is the unexamined premise that only a government might find official statistics useful.