The Tyranny of Numbers: Why Counting Can’t Make Us Happy

The renowned cosmologist Professor Bignumska, lecturing on the future of the universe, had stated that in a billion years according to her calculations, the earth would fall into the sun in a fiery death. In the back of the auditorium a tremulous voice piped up. ‘Excuse me Professor, but h-how long did you say it would be?’ Professor Bignumska calmly replied, ‘About a billion years.’ A sigh of relief was heard. ‘Whew! For a minute there, I thought you said a million years.’

Douglas Hofstadter,Scientific American, May 1982

There are no such things as still lifes.

Erica Jong

Mary Poppins was the first film I ever saw. I was six years, four months old – let’s measure it precisely. I remember trotting as fast as I could beside my father along Whitehall, past the Treasury and the other palaces of national calculation, to the Haymarket. I remember the strange red torches and the national anthem at the end. That’s how it was in those more deferential and innocent days before the hippies. And I remember being completely blown away by the experience, the songs of Julie Andrews and the idea that life should be a little more magical than it was.

Within weeks I knew most of the lyrics by heart, though I barely understood the words. Maybe, in retrospect, I was also a little influenced by Mary Poppins’ ridicule of George Banks – Hollywood has recycled the name George Banks for pompous boobies ever since – and his fascination for the kind of order brought by numbers. ‘They must feel the thrill of totting up a balance book,’ she sings to poor deluded George about his children:

… A thousand cyphers neatly in a row.

When gazing at a graph that shows the profits up,

their little cup of joy should overflow.

The irony is lost on him – as it was on me. And though Hollywood is still busily promoting the idea of magic, you would never catch them in this post-Thatcherite age making fun of profits or ridiculing the vital importance of calculation – still less the idea of cyphers neatly in a row. It’s just too important to us all these days.

So I came away from the cinema determined to make sure I flung my tuppence away on some little old bird woman, rather than marvelling at the strange alchemy of compound interest if I put it in the bank. I was not going to be a George Banks. Yet here I am, 35 years later, with my pension and life insurance, living in a world completely overwhelmed by numbers and calculation.

It’s the same for nearly all of us. There are personal calculations to be made each day, about investments, journey times, bank machines and credit cards. There are professional figures at work, in the form of targets, statistics, workforce percentages and profit forecasts. As consumers, we are counted and aggregated according to every purchase we make. Every time we are exposed to the media, there is a positive flood of statistics controlling and interpreting the world, developing each truth, simplifying each problem. ‘Being a man is unhealthy,’ said the front page of the Evening Standard recently, adding – like every similar newspaper article about statistics – the word: ‘official.’ As if we had been wondering about the truth all these years and, thanks to the counters, we now know. As if the figures are so detached that there is no arguing with them.

But of course we keep arguing. Just as the government keeps arguing despite its battery of benchmarks, quality indicators and league tables, as it struggles to hold back chaos like King Canute in front of the waves. We take our collective pulses 24 hours a day with the use of statistics. We understand life that way, though somehow the more figures we use, the great truths still seem to slip through our fingers. Despite all that calculating, and all that numerical control, we feel as ignorant as ever.

Mary Poppins might have been talking about me when she said that ‘sometimes a person we love, through no fault of his own, can’t see past the end of his nose’. She meant George Banks, of course, but I feel just as myopic myself. Life never keeps still long enough to measure anything important.

If you are said to be ‘calculating’, people could mean one of two things about you – both related and equally repellent. It could mean that you are constantly comparing what is best for you in any given situation. This is not a compliment. It implies something cold, fish-like and completely self-interested. But it could also mean you are someone who counts too much, someone who measures things but can’t see the reality behind them.