Building Back Better | Stats + Stories Episode 195 / by Stats Stories

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Paul is a visiting professor of statistics in the department of mathematics at Imperial College London, UK. His research interests are the measurement of national wellbeing and progress, and the use of these measures in politics, policy, business, and everyday life. He also chairs the Statistics User Forum, an ‘umbrella’ organization that brings together producers and groups of users of UK official statistics. Paul previously spent forty years as a professional statistician, researcher, and policy analyst in the Office for National Statistics and other departments and agencies, including as the director of the Measuring National Wellbeing program. His social media usage is limited to LinkedIn and StatsUserNet.


Episode Description

Over the course of the last year, statistics have framed our lives in very obvious ways. From COVID cases to unemployment rates, stats have helped us understand what’s happening in the wider world. As we contemplate how to “build back better” in the aftermath of the pandemic, official statistics could help guide our way, at least, that’s what the authors of a recent Significance Magazine article think. That’s the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories with guest Paul Allin.

+Full Transcript

Rosemary Pennington
Over the course of the last year, statistics have framed our lives in very obvious ways. From COVID cases to unemployment rates, stats have helped us understand what's happening in the wider world. As we contemplate how to build back better in the aftermath of the pandemic, official statistics could help guide our way at least that's what the authors of a recent significance magazine article think. And it's the focus of this episode of stats and stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories. And the stories behind the statistics. I'm Rosemary Pennington. stats and stories is a production of Miami University's Department of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me are our regular panelist, John Bailer, chair of Miami statistics department, and Richard Campbell, Professor Emeritus of media, journalism and film. Our guest today is Paul Allin, Allin is a visiting professor of statistics in the Department of Mathematics at Imperial College London, UK. His research interests are the measurement of national well being and progress and the use of these measures in politics, policy, business and everyday life. He also chairs the statistics user forum, and umbrella organization, which brings together producers and groups of users of UK official statistics. lm previously spent 40 years as a professional statistician, researcher and policy analyst in the Office for National Statistics, and other departments and agencies, including the director of the measuring national wellbeing program. Paul, thank you so much for being here today. To get our conversation started. I wonder if you could talk about when you think when you talk about official statistics, what are you talking about, you talk about it a bit in your article, and that might be a nice place to sort of ground the conversation?

Paul Allin
Sure. I think official statistics are wonderful. But actually, they're grounded in a very basic idea, which is that they are the statistics produced by official agencies within any country. That's a kind of very simplistic idea. And you need to kind of dwell behind it a bit, just see the range of material that's produced, or in some cases not produced. And also think about the ways in which it is produced under quality. But when it is really interesting to think about kind of who uses these, these figures who uses these data. And the story there is that they start with the government, the government uses it in some cases, official statistics are the government's statistics. But really, the vision behind the visual statistics is that the English must be used much more widely.

John Bailer
So just to take back a little bit and take ourselves back in time, just a little bit, just the history of how this has started up. Because, you know, we certainly want to talk to you about some of your work in thinking about well being statistics. But what was sort of the what was sort of the start of this in the UK, you know, when did when did this kind of the central statistics office come into being and and how did GDP become such a prominent characteristic that led to things like your response such as well being?

Paul Allin
Well, really, you can actually track official statistics way back in time through censuses and the data that we collect for taxation purposes. But the story really gets interesting in the Second World War, when Churchill realized that there were lots of different figures flying around and that different departments were quoting different things and different ministers' work were quoting different things. And he'd simply wanted to put an end to that. And so he kind of decreed in a very Churchillian way, let there be a central Statistical Office of dispatch on this day, and more or less that is what happened. Alongside that, people were very interested in, you know, the economic performance of the country. What on earth is going on? How are we? How are we managing to produce the things we need to produce? And the idea, I think there were kinds of various people like Richard Stone in this country. But a number of your kind compatriots were involved, and took the lead really, in terms of coming together with the system of national accounts to try and make a real assessment of the economic performance of a country in a structured way. And that just grew over the years. Very complex system. Nobody really understands it apart from a small group of people who are the kind of the national accountants of any one country, but it's the summary measure, one of the summary measures that comes out of this. This is the three letters GDP, which we all I think we all hear about, probably nobody really knows what it is, I think, very difficult to give a precise definition, but think of it as the economic activity according to some sort of definition. And if you've got a definition in mind, this uses the idea of a market economy on the boundary. around that production boundary, and then think about, well, what's all that mean? What's all that adds up to this this year or this quarter? And crucially, how does it compare with what we did last year and last quarter. And that's where things start to get even more interesting, because if you then take that GDP measure as your goal for an economy or a goal for a nation, not just to have GDP of a certain size, but to grow the donation that the idea around that no matter what happens, the most important thing is to keep on growing economic growth is the answer to everything. So some people, some people say, and there's a lot of evidence that, you know, through economic growth, a number of countries have managed to live large amounts of their population out of relative poverty. So you know, economic growth does do some good. But I think where the concern over GDP is raised is that actually it's not, it's not, it's not the only measure. And it excludes certain things that you've had done to a coil on your program. And she's kind of very eloquent, much more eloquent than I am about this, you know, but one thing, for example, is that GDP doesn't really take account of the economic damage that's happened to the environment, when you kind of do all this production. So you can dig all this stuff off the ground, and you can produce all this pollution. But you don't really take account of that in GDP. So GDP continues to grow. What do you do these other things as well? And so that's kind of a long nutshell is why we've got the claim for kind of let's look at a bigger broader picture here. Have you

Richard Campbell
have you managed to change the way maybe journalists think about GDP as the site of sole measure of prosperity and well being? And some of the challenges in trying to study well being you use the word subjectivity a lot, which doesn't come up a lot, when you talk to a lot of statisticians, they sort of don't wrestle with some of the problems that come up when your aunt's asking questions that are much more subjective. So I think that's a more complicated question than I wanted to ask. But

Paul Allin
no, it's that kind of topic gives me a way to kind of you kind of call these things come together. A lot of people say it's still early days for all this wellbeing stuff. It's going to take some time to get through, but clearly, some journalists have got it, some campaign groups have got it some, some politicians have got it. I mean, over here in the UK, and especially on other European countries, there's a kind of very strong Green Party. And they tend to get this argument very, very straightforwardly, and are among those who are campaigning for looking at wider, wider measures that have been empty in commissions saying that we should look at look at things in a broader and broader sense. They produce fine reports, which sit on that sit on the shelf, often, sometimes they get quoted, you know, there, there have been developments, like, I was working for a while with the wonderfully named what works center for well being to try and kind of identify how we can learn for the policy from from from well being. But it's a slow, it's a slow process, Rosemary mentioned in her introduction, the kind of the idea of building back better. And I think that's in since the latest time, which people are thinking Well, okay, let's let's let's have we got time to pause and think and look in a broader sense to kind of recalibrate. And there's a chAllinge. I mean, how on earth is that going to happen?

John Bailer
You know, when I, when I read some of what you've written, I think a lot about the idea that, that what we measure and how we decide to measure it, shapes and drives what we ultimately do mean, because, you know, it's, there's, there's this this deep, strong connection between this definition of endpoint and outcome of that we think is important. And then then how we behave in policy. So Can Can you talk a little bit about how this by by expanding this idea of of this economic indicator to include aspects of well being how that ultimately could inform and cause policy to evolve?

Paul Allin
Sure. I think that's, that's a really crucial point, john. And in a sense, what one of the debate I have with my kind of former former colleagues is that they're great at producing things. But actually, I want them also to think about kind of how these things are going to be used and what they're going to be used for. And the root division of official statistics is that they do cover a wide range of different different things that virtually everything you can think of should really be in the output of official statistics somewhere, provided it's been identified that somebody is going to kind of make Real use of it. That's what the United Nations saying their fundamental principles, you know, they want some practical utility here. So we can have a wonderful vision. But putting that into practice really means kind of thinking about who could possibly want to use this, and not just waiting for people to come and knock on your door and say, Please, can we have some statistics on on X or Y, but actually getting out there and working out where the debates are going on working out where there again, emerging needs for official statistics, or work emerging needs for statistics, and how official statistics and perhaps broader sources could could help with that. And I think that's, I mean, I've been there myself, I think that's an uncomfortable position for a statistician and certainly for an official statistician to actually kind of they're faced with the task of getting lots of these statistics out on a fairly regular basis. It's almost like a kind of treadmill where you get the latest GDP figures out and you're immediately working on the next set of GDP, if ik Why do they get time to go out and talk to people how they're going to use them? Good heavens, they've, you know, they've published them, what more do they want? Well, I don't think that's kind of quite, quite good enough anymore. We gotta get that broad range out there so that people don't have the excuse that they can only look at GDP because that's all there is. But they should also be thinking about official first citizens should be thinking about getting out there. And Richard mentioned subjectivity, which I didn't really kind of come back to, but another buzzword that official statisticians don't really like his marketing. And I think as he refuses that decision, do need to get out there. And market their, their wonderful products, and engage much more, much more with people.

Rosemary Pennington
You're listening to stats and stories. And today we're talking to Paul Allin, visiting professor of statistics at Imperial College London. Sorry, Richard, did you want to get in there with the question?

Richard Campbell
Well, I wanted to kind of follow up on the GDP thing, because you one of the things that I've always been annoyed with, as somebody that has also worked as a journalist, and also spent much of my time criticizing journalism, those numbers like for years, the network's would report the Dow Jones at the end, that was just a number. We never knew what it meant. What does it mean, when it rises and falls, if you study it a little bit doesn't mean very much. It means something to I think people who are investing. But GDP is like one of those numbers. And I think you rightly point out in the significance article that people don't really know what that means when you give the GDP number. So I'm going to ask you an unfair question. Which is, how should journalists be reporting this? I mean, they have a limited amount of time, what should they be saying about this? Now, I think I love this whole concept of introducing, you know, complicating this a little bit and you there are certainly more things to our well being than you know how the economy's going. But what would you like to I mean, you must be you must watch this, right, you see this, you read this, and you must be frustrated. There's no explanation ever what this is and what the limitations are?

Paul Allin
Well, Richard, I think you've touched on the domain challenge here, which is the only way you've got to be to say a bit more about what's going on, rather than just having a simple, quick headline, headline number. And that's kind of that's quite, we don't live in that sort of world, actually, we've got to somehow kind of make space to do that. There's part of the paper that I look at each day, which is called the long read. And I don't think many people look at the long range. So maybe the long read isn't going to be the answer to this. But there might be a slightly longer than than headline read. And this may actually only happen from time to time, maybe we have to live for a bit with the fact that GDP comes out every month. And that's going to be reported. And people are really concerned if it's going to go up or down. And how it can how it's pretty among countries compared to another maybe that's that's the way the world is. But also the perhaps there might be opportunities, quite regularly to say, Well, actually, let's just take a pause from that. And let's kind of GDP moping going on. But what's been happening to the climate where we've been having this conversation about GDP, what's what's been happening to the environment, what's been happening to the distribution of incomes, Has everybody benefited? And I think those sorts of topics could well get a bit more resonance and because they they've sort of done so already, but never quite, quite and broken through. I mean, I think the idea that not everybody's income rises in line with GDP for the country as a whole or GDP per capita, I think that message is finally got got through. And it's actually one of those classic things where GDP is a sort of average and it's the kind of average when really nobody gets it because some people are doing extremely well. And many people actually aren't even experienced any sort of growth in their in their incomes. That was certainly the case in the States. It was certainly the case in The UK has been for a while. And yet people only slowly discovered that That must be the kind of thing that it's worth, worth spending a bit of time on from from, from time to time.

John Bailer
So you mentioned in one of your papers, the the questions that were added that sort of touch on well being, and that have been incorporated in some of these surveys. Could you talk just Could you just report kind of what some of those questions were? And then the follow up? What's the most interesting insight that you think has been observed? Since these questions have been added?

Paul Allin
Well, this takes us into these subjective areas that Richard was talking about, because these questions are not the kind of questions that official statisticians are kind of really happy to have been happy with. But but but our last getting, getting more comfortable with them? Because they're all variants of questions which get at people's well being by the simple process of asking them to assess their own well being. So kind of John, you know, how, how satisfied are you with your life these days? Wow, you say, Well, what a big question. Okay. Richard down yesterday, you know, on the whole, you know, on a scale of nought to 10, how happy were you? Or how, how sad, were you? And the fourth question is about how you feel life is worthwhile. These are all questions drawn from what actually is a kind of pretty wide academic, and prolonged academic study into getting people to assess their own well being. There are any headline questions, you could always add lots more to delve down into that. But those questions have been added to the UK as regular household surveys, the ones that I understand to topic, topic based surveys as well. So the idea is getting around that we should just ask these questions as much as we can. So Gosh, it's really difficult. what are the what are the what's what's really interesting inside I have been so long kind of advocating that these questions should be used. But I've kind of got a bit out of the habit of looking at what they say. I think reassuringly, they do actually mirror what you would think is going on. So actually, wellbeing hasn't been that great over the course of the pandemic one, maybe you don't need a survey to tell you that. But actually, what you do need to survey is just to look at which particular groups have been doing better or less well, or which particular part of the country. And that's where I think you get the insights.

Richard Campbell
One of the things I like about some of the things that you're doing is the link between the statistician and the journalists. And you talk about that statisticians need to be holding government accountable. That's what journalists are supposed to do as well. And it seems like there's a lot of room here for for better partnerships. I mean, I think we started this podcast, partly to explore this, the the sort of shared interest and differences between statisticians and journalists. But you're holding government accountable is not something I think a lot of statisticians might be interested in doing. And that seems like a chAllinge. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Paul Allin
Yeah, yeah, I think it's, it's, it's really about kind of not being fair and doing no favor in terms of kind of the facts that are produced as official statistics and how they can be made available to people to use, including you, in general, I don't think I'm actually kind of asking my colleagues to themselves hold the government to account but they have to be brave enough to provide the tools for other people to hold the government to account using these these facts. And of course, it's not just official statistics that are used in this in this process. I mean, that's, that's one of the interesting angles here is to see how statistics can be used with other bits of information other by journalists delving through what we have in the UK is a kind of a Freedom of Information process, which to try and kind of Winkle things out of out of government to try and build a bigger picture. So maybe it's very much for the kind of the journalists to kind of do the work, but the statisticians need to make sure that they're doing their bit in kind of providing what they can,

Rosemary Pennington
as we've been having this conversation, I keep thinking about this phrase that you use, or even just this name that you used in the significance article, public statistics. And I wonder if you could sort of tease that out a little bit in relation to sort of this idea of the official statistic.

Paul Allin
Yeah, yeah, I think it's a phrase which I kind of didn't invent. I kind of just dove in, I liked what we were hearing about it. And we wanted to develop this idea. The appeal for it is that it starts with thinking about how these figures are going to be used, not who's producing them. And I think that's the kind of really, really crucial thing. So the idea of public statistics is that let's think of the questions let's delve into and find the questions that people want answers to, and these people could be Policymakers but they could also, most importantly, be members of the public, be journalists, be campaigning groups be be unions, be businesses, you know, be household. And let's get all those out and have a process which kind of brings the questions out. And then we can look for the best statistics that answer those and help answer those questions. Many of those statistics will be official statistics. But some of them will not be. And I think what we found here in the UK during the COVID crisis is that official statistics are necessary, but they're not sufficient to provide the answer. So here, then, the way we envisage is that the role of official statisticians becomes more of a kind of a curator of a set of statistics, many of which they will have produced themselves, but others, which they will have drawn in, through whatever process works best. assess the quality of that to make sure that kind of those statistics are then available to answer the questions that people have.

John Bailer
You know, I'm curious, I think the the idea of measurement here both measurement of GDP and measurement of wellbeing. And when I think about GDP, you often hear comparisons of countries with the idea that, that, you know, if I look at country x as GDP and country wise GDP, that that those kinds of changes and relative changes have some meaning some interpretation, and some get there's something that's that's directly comparable, or maybe that's a fiction, but it's something that's that is believed. But But when I think about well being, I start to wonder about kind of differences that might exist, you know, are there kind of baseline cultural country specific differences that might exist and how you respond? I mean, you gave the example about well being during the COVID, within the context of groups within a country with the idea that perhaps there's some shared sense of, of touchstone, some common common reference origin. I mean, does that does that apply? When do you sort of say, well, we can't really think about these types of well, being comparisons broadly across

Paul Allin
countries? Um, I think I start from the position of being, questioning why we might want to make those comparisons.

John Bailer
Just intrinsic curiosity. Yeah, well, yeah, that's okay. That's it. But that's it. But that's a really good point. That's really so yeah. What questions are informed by such comparisons? I think that's a great,

Paul Allin
great read. Exactly. And if we kind of went into it there, we might find that there could be some core questions that we might want to see if they worked across countries across cultures, in different parts of parts of the world. I mean, the source language issues and translation issues as all sorts of things and they are hardly scratched out at the moment. I mean, I mean, that said, People like Gallup have been asking questions in many countries around the world for a very long time. And so there's a lot of experience there that suggests that you can ask questions, and you can get answers. Just how comparable these things are, takes you into some very interesting areas. Are you then comparing cultural differences? Are you comparing differences in the same, this standard thing called well being, I can read stuff in a position that I think well being is probably culturally defined and culturally explicit. And we need to kind of bear that in mind when we try to make any of these comparisons.

Rosemary Pennington
Well, that's all the time we have for this episode of stats and stories. Paul, thank you so much for being here today.

Paul Allin Thank you very much for having me. It's great to talk with you. Thank you.

Rosemary Pennington

Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics, and Media, Journalism and Film, and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your email to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net, and be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.