Life Without Statistics - Hooray!

Some good news: the government of India’s bureau of statistics is losing data-collecting staff, as they are leaving in droves for better conditions in the private sector.

Very soon, it seems, the nation’s “vital statistics” will be unavailable to the central planners.

Data like “gross domestic product index, index of industrial production, price indices and national surveys” will soon be unavailable.

So bloody what?

Recall Sir John Cowptherwaite in colonial Hong Kong: he refused to set up a statistical bureau and see how Hong Kong prospered.

Such statistics are only important if you want to “plan the economy.”

If you do not want to “command the economy”, leaving all businessmen perfectly free, you do not need statistics.

You do not need statistics on the “national economy” (what’s that?) if you only want to administer justice.

Cowptherwaite ran the police, some courts, and kept the city functional. No statistics are required for the efficient performance of these functions.

The report says that the Indian statistical bureau will try to sell data to private companies. But business decisions are mainly based on profit and loss – and very little else.

Planning decisions are based on statistics – without any reference to profit and loss. This is the worst of all possible worlds.

And note that planning refers to the future, while all statistics are numerical accounts of the past. Every statistic is "the numbers" on something that happened in the past.

Thus, the planner seeks to know the future – but all the “knowledge” he really has is about the past.

Can the future be inferred from statistics?

Of course not!

There are no statistical laws.

There are only laws of Economics (or praxeology or catallactics).

The planner knows naught of these.

And yes, he wants to teach.