Federico Reyes Heroles
The only difference between humans and beasts is the ability to foresee.
Bertrand Russell
That word provokes skepticism and even mockery in some people. How easy it is to lie with numbers! Others associate it with inhuman coldness: Counting the dead will never be gratifying. But human shame must be recorded numerically. The use of statistics is at the very heart of any civilizing process.
It isn’t easy to date its birth. It is known that, in prehistoric times, some civilizations used signs to count animals or people. There are cave paintings that show counts. In Babylon and China, around 2200 BC, records—censuses?—were kept of births and members of the armies. Thucydides describes the calculations of the Athenians before the enemy walls in the Peloponnesian War. Pascal is a touchstone in the evolution of the new science. A Prussian economist, Gottfried Achenwall, is credited with coining the term “statistics,” linking it to the status, so often used by Machiavelli, that is, a matter proper to the State.
There is a beautiful book—given to me by a dear friend, Enrique Alduncin, who is an actuary—called Against the Gods, by Peter L. Bernstein. It recounts charmingly how statistics also made its way into other fields. Some English shipowners, whom I imagine in a pub, put numbers on the ships lost in the English Channel and their link to weather conditions. Today, it seems incredible. But statistics also found powerful enemies in ignorance, dogma, and religion. If the gods, whoever they were, had already determined that many children would die in their early years, trying to change that fate was… confronting them.
Statistics delivered outstanding results for research, public health (particularly vaccines), insurance companies, and entrepreneurs. The evolution of air transport is based on statistics. A recent example was the exciting discussion among aircraft manufacturers and international authorities, such as the ICAO, about why a twin-engine aircraft could be as safe, or even safer, than a four-engine aircraft on intercontinental flights. Statistics are, in a sense, the language of a certain obligatory social rationality. But there is one condition: no one can own them. Every citizen must have the opportunity to confront the truths of companies, insurance companies, and, of course, governments. Data from public servants is born with a conflict of interest: dropout or educational performance rates from those in charge of that area, or health, or missing persons, will always be met with valid skepticism. That is why international assessments are so helpful, whether from organizations such as the United Nations, the OECD, PISA, for example, or on climate change. Strong, solid, democratic states always have a parallel framework to the official one, which sometimes corroborates official statements and sometimes does not. Dialogue with figures is inherent to modernity.
Eradicating independent bodies weakens governments. “What resists, supports,” someone once said. They made the INAI disappear, but now the PIPA — Investigative Journalists for Access to Public Information — has appeared. Its first report is a cash flow statement on the evasion, delays, and deficiencies of the National Transparency Platform. What did they gain? Destruction as an instinct. Excélsior published an alarming statistic yesterday: only 25% of Mexican municipalities have a risk map, and many were drawn up 15 years ago. Therein lie the painful consequences. Saving lives means vaccinating, mapping risks, and taking precautions. Fonden used to do that. Once again, destruction.
October 20 is World Statistics Day. Let’s take the numbers seriously.
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