英国卫报:你还在相信统计数据吗?(6)（在线收听）

These innovations carried extraordinary potential for governments. By simplifying diverse populations down to specific indicators, and displaying them in suitable tables, governments could circumvent the need to acquire broader detailed local and historical insight. Of course, viewed from a different perspective, this blindness to local cultural variability is precisely what makes statistics vulgar and potentially offensive. Regardless of whether a given nation had any common cultural identity, statisticians would assume some standard uniformity or, some might argue, impose that uniformity upon it.

这些创新为政府带来了巨大的潜力。通过将不同的人口简化为具体的指标，并将其显示在适当的表格中，政府可以绕过获取更广泛、详细的地方和历史见解的需要。当然，从不同的角度来看，正是由于这种对当地文化多样性的忽视，使得统计数据变得粗俗，甚至具有潜在的攻击性。不管一个国家是否有任何共同的文化特征，统计学家都会假定某种标准的统一性，或者有些人可能认为，强加这种统一性。

Not every aspect of a given population can be captured by statistics. There is always an implicit choice in what is included and what is excluded, and this choice can become a political issue in its own right. The fact that GDP only captures the value of paid work, thereby excluding the work traditionally done by women in the domestic sphere, has made it a target of feminist critique since the 1960s. In France, it has been illegal to collect census data on ethnicity since 1978, on the basis that such data could be used for racist political purposes. (This has the side-effect of making systemic racism in the labour market much harder to quantify.)

统计数据并不能捕捉到特定种群的每一个方面。什么被包括和什么被排除总是有一个隐含的选择，而这个选择本身就可能成为一个政治问题。GDP只包含有偿工作的价值，因此排除了传统上由妇女从事的家务劳动，这一事实使其自20世纪60年代以来成为女权主义批评的目标。在法国，自1978年以来，收集关于种族的人口普查数据是非法的，因为这些数据可以用于种族主义政治目的。(这有一个副作用，那就是让劳动力市场上系统性的种族主义更加难以量化。)

Despite these criticisms, the aspiration to depict a society in its entirety, and to do so in an objective fashion, has meant that various progressive ideals have been attached to statistics. The image of statistics as a dispassionate science of society is only one part of the story. The other part is about how powerful political ideals became invested in these techniques: ideals of "evidence-based policy", rationality, progress and nationhood grounded in facts, rather than in romanticised stories.

尽管有这些批评，但要以客观的方式完整地描绘一个社会的愿望就意味着各种进步的理想都附在了统计数字之上。统计学被认为是一门冷静的社会科学，这只是故事的一部分。另一部分是关于强大的政治理想如何被投入到这些技巧当中的：“基于证据的政策”、理性、进步和国家地位的理想基于事实，而不是浪漫的故事。