Bear Statistics

There is one thing which must be said about our so-called scientific age, namely, that it is in fact extremely superstitious and uncritical. It has produced great numbers of scientists, technical men and administrators excellent in their own fields, who nevertheless, as soon as they step outside them, betray a gullibility far beyond that of our less educated but shrewder predecessors. Showing no interest, most of them, in supernatural things, it is regarding terrestrial affairs, particularly politics and economics, that these otherwise intelligent men develop their superstitions. For example, it is almost universally believed by educated men— just because they have heard someone say so, not from any examination of the evidence—that no economic ill-effects follow from excessive taxation; that two-thirds of the world is hungry (this statement by Lord Boyd-Orr was just a plain error in arithmetic); and that productivity in the USSR is advancing much faster than in the United States, so that it is only a matter of a few years before the United States is overtaken.

This latter view has received almost universal credence, and has been stated by many authorities, including spokesmen of the United States Government and of its intelligence services. The evidence on which it is based, when one comes to examine it, is found to be extremely flimsy. Much of it was based on the period 1948-53, when the Soviet Union was recovering from the effects of the German invasion. As any parent knows, a child suffering a serious illness will show a substantial loss in weight; as soon as the illness is over, weight increases at more than the usual rate, until the child has again reached the weight normal for its age, after which point the usual rate of growth is continued. What would we think of a doctor who took measurements of a child’s weight during such a recovery period, put them on a statistical diagram, and then predicted from his diagram that the child would go on growing at this rate, and that at the end of the year it would weigh more than its father? But many economists do this sort of thing and get away with it.

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Colin Clark

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There is one thing which must be said about our so-called scientific age, namely, that it is in fact extremely superstitious and uncritical. It has produced great numbers of scientists, technical men and administrators excellent in their own fields, who nevertheless, as soon as they step outside them, betray a gullibility far beyond that of our less educated but shrewder predecessors. Showing no interest, most of them, in supernatural things, it is regarding terrestrial affairs, particularly politics and economics, that these otherwise intelligent men develop their superstitions. For example, it is almost universally believed by educated men— just because they have heard someone say so, not from any examination of the evidence—that no economic ill-effects follow from excessive taxation; that two-thirds of the world is hungry (this statement by Lord Boyd-Orr was just a plain error in arithmetic); and that productivity in the USSR is advancing much faster than in the United States, so that it is only a matter of a few years before the United States is overtaken.

This latter view has received almost universal credence, and has been stated by many authorities, including spokesmen of the United States Government and of its intelligence services. The evidence on which it is based, when one comes to examine it, is found to be extremely flimsy. Much of it was based on the period 1948-53, when the Soviet Union was recovering from the effects of the German invasion. As any parent knows, a child suffering a serious illness will show a substantial loss in weight; as soon as the illness is over, weight increases at more than the usual rate, until the child has again reached the weight normal for its age, after which point the usual rate of growth is continued. What would we think of a doctor who took measurements of a child’s weight during such a recovery period, put them on a statistical diagram, and then predicted from his diagram that the child would go on growing at this rate, and that at the end of the year it would weigh more than its father? But many economists do this sort of thing and get away with it.