英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(8)（在线收听）

To recognise how statistics have been entangled in notions of national progress, consider the case of GDP. GDP is an estimate of the sum total of a nation's consumer spending, government spending, investments and trade balance (exports minus imports), which is represented in a single number. This is fiendishly difficult to get right, and efforts to calculate this figure began, like so many mathematical techniques, as a matter of marginal, somewhat nerdish interest during the 1930s. It was only elevated to a matter of national political urgency by the second world war, when governments needed to know whether the national population was producing enough to keep up the war effort. In the decades that followed, this single indicator, though never without its critics, took on a hallowed political status, as the ultimate barometer of a government's competence. Whether GDP is rising or falling is now virtually a proxy for whether society is moving forwards or backwards.

想要认识统计数据是如何与国家进步的概念纠缠在一起的，不妨以GDP为例。GDP用一个数字表示，是对一个国家的消费支出、政府支出、投资和贸易平衡(出口减去进口)总和的估计。计算这个数字是极其困难的。在20世纪30年代，为之所付出的努力就像许多数学技术一样，只是一种边缘的、有点书呆子气的兴趣。直到第二次世界大战时，各国政府需要知道全国人口是否有足够的生产能力来维持战争，这个问题才被提升为国家政治上的紧急事项。在接下来的几十年里，这个单一的指标尽管从来没有遭到过批评，却获得了神圣的政治地位，成为了评判政府能力的终极晴雨表。GDP是上升还是下降，实际上已经成为社会前进还是后退的一个指标。

Or take the example of opinion polling, an early instance of statistical innovation occurring in the private sector. During the 1920s, statisticians developed methods for identifying a representative sample of survey respondents, so as to glean the attitudes of the public as a whole. This breakthrough, which was first seized upon by market researchers, soon led to the birth of the opinion polling. This new industry immediately became the object of public and political fascination, as the media reported on what this new science told us about what "women" or "Americans" or "manual labourers" thought about the world.

再以民意调查为例，民意调查是私营部门统计创新的早期例子。20世纪20年代间，统计学家发明了一些方法：在调查对象中确定一个具有代表性的样本，以此来收集公众的整体态度。这一突破最初被市场研究人员使用，之后不久民意调查由此衍生，这一行业也随即成为公众和政界关注的对象，因为这一新兴科学向我们展示了“女性”、“美国人”或者“体力劳动者”对世界的看法，而媒体对此进行了报道。

Nowadays, the flaws of polling are endlessly picked apart. But this is partly due to the tremendous hopes that have been invested in polling since its origins. It is only to the extent that we believe in mass democracy that we are so fascinated or concerned by what the public thinks. But for the most part it is thanks to statistics, and not to democratic institutions as such, that we can know what the public thinks about specific issues. We underestimate how much of our sense of "the public interest" is rooted in expert calculation, as opposed to democratic institutions.

如今，民意调查的缺陷愈加显露，一定程度上是因为人们从一开始便对投票寄予了厚望。只有在我们相信大众民主的程度上，我们才会对公众的想法如此着迷或关心。但在很大程度上，我们能够了解公众对具体问题的看法要归功于统计数据而不是民主制度本身。我们低估了大众的“公共利益”感来源于专家的计算而不是民主制度的程度。