Crap IT means stats crew don't really know how UK economy's doing Clunky IT systems at the Office for National Statistics (ONS) have contributed to inaccurate reporting of economic growth, according to an independent review of UK economic statistics. The report (PDF), by Professor Sir Charles Bean of the London School of Economics, said the ONS's current technology estate "is in dire need of …
well with maths illiteracy being an acceptable social phenomena. The govt and corps don't want everyone educated - they want you to *pay* for education, just not get above your station. The lowest common denominator are the numbers that can be fudged.
This makes the hand waving hierarchy of the media (source -> media A -> media B -> media C -> BBC -> Daily Mail), nicely confusing to fill up the news cycle.
You cannot trust any analysis without seeing the working.
True for molecules - And would true for economics, if it wasn't all made up....
P.
Processing, and collecting
We've received a official survey from some part of HMG looking at IT use.
They want, among many questions, to be told what percentage of invoices are sent out electronically. And how much value of the month's invoicing that is, as a percentage, to ONE decimal point.
Because when you're aggregating a bunch of small businesses electronic trading, those point-ones really add up. But deliver less in terms of understanding the UK economy than the lost time for all the businesses trying to work out the data.
This is the time-honoured tradition of fiddling the books. Goodhart's law applies, and measured GDP has long-since passed its use-by date, and reached a peak of systematic bias in the Blair Feelgood bubble of a decade ago when it was massively overstated.
Now it seems we're going to leverage up the con. Put the whole bias on steroids; create a new Derivative product from Goodhart. Could this be a panic response to the apparent ending of the bubble in Prime London property sales to the foreign super-rich that has served as a crutch to the stats since the big crash?
Well, the super rich will be always be buying prime real estate, often writing off any current building on the property. So emptymansions that no-one lives in make sense in a world where buying bits of London have proved a very good long term investment for all involved. Or buying any property where the long term value is the land and building permits, and not the actual building.
It of course has nothing to do with either dirty money, nor with people finding ways around foreign capital exchange rules, nor with London being a magic portal into legal and taxational ringworlds of great ingenuity and terror. Because no good and honest bank would ever do that. HSBC only launders drug money out of tradition etc.
GDP is of course a fantasy that would be applauded even by Orwell. GDP has increased Free Citizen! Life is Good! Do the Spend! Watch the Strictly! Where is your trans-awareness-and-love day bracelet citizen? Do you not the love the trans and accept them as the wonderful people they are? Are you in fact, a Hater?!? Did you not see that GDP has risen, and We Are Happy! Don't be a Hater!
Where's my coat. I need to buy beer. Raising GDP and the happiness index at the same time.
Can't they just put all their data into some marvellous cloud? Then all they need for each important staff member is a PC running MS Access. Bring Your Own would save costs, the Treasury might suggest.
Except, of course, they have to get data into the cloud. I suspect that is where the problems are.
"Except, of course, they have to get data into the cloud. I suspect that is where the problems are."
I have a random number generator they could licence from me on a per day, per CPU basis for a low, low price. Just so long as they sign up for the support agreement and rent the licence management software from me required to make sure everything runs smoothly (into my bank account.)
'Different statistical outputs are produced in isolation and the supporting IT systems are poorly interconnected, with "hundreds of applications, on 25 different platforms,"'
Have they tried hiring a developer to write an app that converts the output from the applications to XML and then use this data as input to the final report generator?
[Different statistical outputs are produced in isolation and the supporting IT systems are poorly interconnected, with "hundreds of applications, on 25 different platforms," according to the report.]
We have collected files. Instead of baselined on quality, we have made people responsible for both processing the data and scrubbing/reporting and knowing what's in it. And now wonder why everybody has their own programming standards, their own hard and software choices, and their own data-quality standards. Vendors and knowledgeowrkers together with lower management dictate what is happening?
What you reward you reap.
Heard on the news that 90%(!) of their "top statisticians" were not willing to make the move from London to Newport when the headquarters were relocated. That was back in 2006, but if true then it must have dented their capabilities, IT infrastructure limitations notwithstanding.
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