The debate over fake news is no doubt amusing to any attentive journalist capable of sifting evidence. Claiming that much of the news is fake is a little like discovering that water is wet.
It has long been the case that the forces arrayed against the media have been overwhelming, and, with journalistic ranks thinning, there is less and less resistance to spin, disinformation and propaganda. George Orwell's vision in 1984 is beginning to look like old news.
It is not just fake news that is the problem. Increasingly, we live in a world of fake figures, especially of the financial type. There is a cliche in management that 'what gets measured gets done'. In public discourse that might be translated to 'what gets measured is considered real'.
A little thought shows this to be nonsense. If someone claimed that the beauty of Mozart is 145.3 per cent greater than Brahms, it would obviously be ridiculous. But it does not mean such beauty does not exist. It just means that it is not accessible to quantitative measurement.
To push this measurement bias, a distinction is often made between 'anecdotal' and 'quantitative' claims. It is true that stories are necessarily partial. But that does not mean that quantitative measures are the solution. Often, they have even greater problems.
One obvious fake figure is gross domestic product, or GDP, which is taken as a measure of national wellbeing. In fact, it is just a measure of transactions. If money changes hands because something disastrous happens then GDP will rise. The recent tsunami in Japan, for example, led to a rise in that country's GDP. Yet it was hardly an indicator of national wellbeing.
GDP is not even a proper measure of production. As the economist Michael Hudson has noted finance, insurance and real estate do not produce anything; they are parasitical. If they are taken out of GDP it shows most developed economies withering. This is not a new insight; Robert F Kennedy pointed out decades ago that GDP measures 'everything except that which is worthwhile'.
Alternative quantitative measures of national wellbeing rarely convince. For example the Peace Index is superficially impressive, but does not withstand much scrutiny. It is based on normalisation of national statistics, which must be considered a gigantic leap of faith given the poor quality of number collection, especially in poorer countries.
"Any quantitative measurement of human activity often ends up being a precise calculation of nothing at all."
It suffers from the vice of positivism: the belief that something is only real if it can be measured. A related intellectual trap is nominalism: the belief that naming something makes it real. Use a word like 'peace' often enough and eventually it will seem that it has an independent existence. The next step is to make peace into a 'thing' that can be examined in isolation: an intellectual error known as reification.
It is all illusion. Even if one accepts that there is a measure of peaceful and non-peaceful behaviour, it is only behaviour. Peace within a person, and a society, has at least three elements: behaviour, intentions and self-awareness. The first may be roughly measurable, but the second is subjective and unknown and the third is notoriously difficult even to define (especially as people can be aware of any measure you make of them).
The subjective simply cannot be measured objectively, and the subjective is at least as important to peace, especially the intentions of those who control today's weaponry — Donald Trump's and Kim Jong-un's current intentions, which can only be known by themselves, being a case in point.
Quantitative measures, and the lists created from them, make for attractive media fodder by reducing national comparisons to the level of a sporting contest. But any quantitative measurement of human activity often ends up being a precise calculation of nothing at all (at least GDP is a measure of something).
When measurable differences are stark enough, quantitative measures can inform. For example, the fact that America has about 800 foreign bases when Russia and China only have a handful can be considered an indicator of those countries' peaceful intent. That America spends almost as much on its military as the rest of the world combined might also be considered revealing.
But too often quantification is as much a trap as a way of revealing the truth. When it comes to figures, it is well to assume that many, if not most, have at least an element of fakery.
David James is the managing editor of businessadvantagepng.com. He was involved in a project related to the Peace Index.