GUEST POST The Tyranny of Numbers by David Boyle

Anselm Anon pays tribute to David Boyle, who we lost earlier this year, by revisiting one of his best books.

David Boyle’s death in June this year was mourned by many in the Liberal Democrats and beyond. These tributes give a good sense of a life well lived. I barely knew him personally, but greatly admired his writing, so was prompted to re-read The Tyranny of Numbers, published in 2000.  

There are two strands to the book. One is historical: it traces the impact of ‘statistical thinking’ in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This isn’t mathematics as such, but the application of numbers to the organisation of human society. 

The crucial figure in this history is Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832).  The founder of Utilitarianism devoted his considerable, albeit idiosyncratic, intellectual gifts to the project of re-ordering society on rational and benevolent lines.  

Boyle is acutely aware of the paradoxes of Bentham’s legacy. On the one hand, it informed and inspired fundamental developments in nineteenth-century society. These included practical improvements in public policy (for instance by his disciple Edwin Chadwick, the public health pioneer), and social research (such as Charles Booth’s classic studies on poverty in London), as well as the work of the Liberal writer and MP John Stuart Mill. 

Yet at the same time, the preoccupation with ‘rational’ counting fed into the “dull authoritarian socialism” of Beatrice and Sidney Webb and others. It fostered the attitude that qualitative data is real, and lived human experience is secondary.  As Boyle puts it, this empowers “people who muddle up the numbers with the truth.”  This is at the root of many of our ills.  

The book’s second strand examines the impact of ‘statistical thinking’ on a variety of political, economic, and environmental questions.  Boyle’s argument is clear but nuanced. He criticises an inappropriate over-reliance on numerical data – the tyranny of numbers.  Operation waiting times are prioritised rather than health, school league tables rather than education, crime statistics rather than neighbourliness.

And in every area, narrow short-term financial calculation carries more weight than real yet intangible human and environmental qualities (“the strange idea that once you have counted the money, you have counted everything”). 

But Boyle isn’t an obscurantist, or a touchy-feely romantic who wants to do away with boring numbers. He recognises their value as a tool to inform and improve peoples’ lives.  One example he gives is how, in the 1960s, gathering and publishing data on air pollution drove improvements in air quality in American cities. 

As he puts it:

You do have to count – the important thing is to realize that you can’t succeed in measuring the real value of anything.

Boyle correctly identifies three interconnected looming challenges: the environment, the digital economy, and what he calls the ‘counting crisis’, as public policy becomes warped by preoccupation with its own data, rather living human experience.   

Subsequent developments have intensified the trends that Boyle identifies. In an unwittingly prescient turn of phrase, he mentions the widespread desire to “take back some kind of control” in response to the tyranny of numbers.  It is depressing that so little progress has been made. 

Yet Boyle’s response remains sensible and thought-provoking.  One element is decentralisation, which surely needs no elaboration to readers of Liberal England. Another is to address “… a massive loss of faith in our own judgement, intuition and our trust in other people”. 

This seems more important than ever, especially in a digital environment awash with malicious nonsense. There isn’t a single way to do this, but that is rather the point.  It is something we can all try to integrate into our own lives and politics.

Having enjoyed Boyle’s earlier book on local currencies, Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash, I first read The Tyranny of Numbers in 2001. The book is not explicitly party political, but the critique of New Labour’s managerialism is everywhere. 

That was part of the appeal to me at the time, as a Liberal Democrat campaigner in complacent Labour local authorities. But the book’s historical perspective gives it much more staying power.

The Tyranny of Numbers is engagingly written, and animated by an insatiable curiosity. It is sensible, clear-sighted, and humane. Alongside David Boyle’s other writing, it is well worth continued attention.

 Anselm Anon has been a member of the Liberal Democrats since the 1990s.