英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(9)（在线收听）

As indicators of health, prosperity, equality, opinion and quality of life have come to tell us who we are collectively and whether things are getting better or worse, politicians have leaned heavily on statistics to buttress their authority. Often, they lean too heavily, stretching evidence too far, interpreting data too loosely, to serve their cause. But that is an inevitable hazard of the prevalence of numbers in public life, and need not necessarily trigger the type of wholehearted rejections of expertise that we have witnessed recently.

随着健康指标、繁荣指标、平等指标、意见指标和生活质量指标使我们逐渐意识到我们是谁、情况是在变好还是在变坏，政治家们也变得严重依赖统计数据来巩固自己的权威。通常情况下他们太过依赖、夸大证据，对数据的解释过于松散，以致于无法为自己的事业服务。但这是公共生活中数字泛滥的一个不可避免的危险，并不一定会引发我们最近看到的那种对专业知识的全盘否定。

In many ways, the contemporary populist attack on "experts" is born out of the same resentment as the attack on elected representatives. In talking of society as a whole, in seeking to govern the economy as a whole, both politicians and technocrats are believed to have "lost touch" with how it feels to be a single citizen in particular. Both statisticians and politicians have fallen into the trap of "seeing like a state", to use a phrase from the anarchist political thinker James C Scott. Speaking scientifically about the nation – for instance in terms of macroeconomics – is an insult to those who would prefer to rely on memory and narrative for their sense of nationhood, and are sick of being told that their "imagined community" does not exist.

当代民粹主义者对“专家”的攻击和对民选代表的攻击在很多方面源自同样的怨恨。人们认为，在将社会作为一个整体来谈论时、在寻求将经济作为一个整体来治理时，政治家和技术官僚都“迷失”了自己作为一个特定公民的感觉。用无政府主义政治思想家詹姆斯·C·斯科特的话来说，统计学家和政治家都掉进了“看起来像一个国家”的陷阱。科学地谈论国家——例如从宏观经济学的角度——是对那些更愿意依靠记忆和叙述来获得民族认同感的人的侮辱，他们厌倦了别人告诉他们“想象中的社区”并不存在。

On the other hand, statistics (together with elected representatives) performed an adequate job of supporting a credible public discourse for decades if not centuries. What changed?

另一方面，统计数据(以及民选代表)在几十年甚至几百年的时间里在支持可信的公众话语方面发挥了足够的作用。那么它改变了什么？

The crisis of statistics is not quite as sudden as it might seem. For roughly 450 years, the great achievement of statisticians has been to reduce the complexity and fluidity of national populations into manageable, comprehensible facts and figures. Yet in recent decades, the world has changed dramatically, thanks to the cultural politics that emerged in the 1960s and the reshaping of the global economy that began soon after. It is not clear that the statisticians have always kept pace with these changes. Traditional forms of statistical classification and definition are coming under strain from more fluid identities, attitudes and economic pathways. Efforts to represent demographic, social and economic changes in terms of simple, well-recognised indicators are losing legitimacy.

统计危机并不像看上去那么突然。在大约450年的时间里，统计学家的伟大成就在于将国家人口的复杂性和流动性降低为易于管理、易于理解的事实和数据。然而，近几十年来，由于20世纪60年代出现的文化政治以及此后不久开始的全球经济重塑，世界发生了巨大变化，目前还不清楚统计学家们是否一直与这些变化保持同步。传统的统计分类和定义形式正受到越来越不稳定的身份、态度和经济路径的压力。用简单、公认的指标来代表人口、社会和经济变化的做法正在失去其合法性。