76. Statistics as a moral science

Unpublished
Dec 26 1998

Where in the Dickens’ do the wise men and women of the Globe and Mail’s editorial board find their seasonal advice-giving strategies? Hopefully not in the self-depreciating or self-defensive logic that “the rich deserve to be rich, the poor deserve to be poor, that’s the way it has always been, and what government does will never change that fact” as supported by 25% of those Canadians recently polled by Macleans and the CBC.
Doesn’t the year-end holiday demand a pause in the carpet-bombing rhetorics of trickle-down economics and market efficiencies? Shouldn’t home-owning board members with well-paid jobs be writing holly-decorated editorials about the satisfactions of luxuries instead of demanding better ways to more accurately calculate levels of poverty (Drawing the line on poverty issues, December 19), or the scale of homelessness that purportedly “reeks of advocacy inflation” (Gimme shelter: homelessness in Canada, December 23)?
Instead of lobbying Santa for a better statistical science maybe the Globe in the new year should take a little space to trace the nineteenth-century histories of the state and statistics: the “moral science” that studied “immoral behaviour” and the study within political laboratories of paupery and its threat to social order.
The editorial jesting about the ways (“wait until Spring?”) to implicate the homeless, poor and unemployed into the order in which they must be integrated says a lot about the unlearning that has accompanied the dismantling of the welfare state. If capitalism can and does produce sufficient surplus and if the numbers of persons affected in Canada are much smaller than advertised, then where are the compensating jobs, homes and the basic incomes? Or are we at heart still stuck with the same moral reservations of rewarding “immoral behaviour” that led to social control and dissuasion through prisons and workhouses?