The following was first published on February 11, 2016 in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian newspaper.
Few occasions call for reprising of the late George
Chambers’ famous admonition to return to work after the fete than this
post-Carnival season, sadly destined for assured relapse at the onset of Easter.
Whether we like it or not (and there is evidence that we collectively
don’t), the business of achieving and maintaining an even keel calls for an
urgent downing of Carnival arms – whatever its perceived and in my view,
mythical, value in easing the pains and tensions of the real world.
It might be that someone would finally do the honest
mathematics to disaggregate temporal emotional gain from the real value of the
creative products generated by the event. But that is work yet to be done.
But where do we begin? Let me have a shot at that.
It is my view, that one of the defining features of
countries focused on development is a commitment to understanding the true
nature of the challenges that confront them. This calls for a preference for statistics
over superstition and for facts over fairytales.
Among the people who understand this best are those who
occupy space in the worlds of business and applied science. The wise
businessman or woman delivers goods and services to markets in which there is
measurable and affirmed demand at prices that are competitive, while the civil
engineer calculates the thickness of the steel required to bear the weight of
the largest trucks along the bridges he designs.
Miscalculations related to market size and demand or the
true strength of the bridge can yield disastrous results.
In real-world journalism training, to cite one other area in
which the employing of science is being encouraged – as opposed to guessing,
obeah and mere intuition – there is now an insistence on adopting standards
related to what is now known as data journalism, but what has always been described
as the “journalism of verification”.
It does not mean that journalists suddenly become scientists
or researchers in the classical sense, but that they become more aware of the
distinction between provable fact and speculation and accord them due
recognition and treatment in their stories.
In countries such as ours that rely heavily on intuition,
guesswork and tribal favouritism in the framing of public policy and action there
is always the tendency to eschew science in favour of popular wisdom. For
example, international research on the contribution of all forms of corporal
punishment to the use of violence as a means of addressing conflict is ignored
in favour of the pronouncement that “I get beat and I didn’t come out that
bad.”
On the base of such an assertion, I would assume that (among
other things) a survey of prison inmates at Port of Spain, Golden Grove and
Carrera would find, as a corollary to this argument, that the vast majority of
violent criminal offenders had once been “spoilt children” who had been spared
the rod. But, I am only guessing. Perhaps the work of a clever UWI
post-graduate student is sealed away somewhere with the information we need to deliver
a judgment.
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| The fete is over |
There is also research elsewhere which suggests that the
death penalty does not produce a deterrent effect on the incidence of homicide.
Yet, with each perceived “crime wave” comes the “hang dem high” posse, led by
politicians in power intent on riding the wave of public opinion based on
questionable assumptions. If the rationale is revenge, then there can probably
be another discussion.
Enter now the National Statistical Institute (NSI), out of
the ashes of the Central Statistical Office (CSO). If there is one institution
that is an absolute pre-requisite to the shaping of public policy it would be
the CSO under any new name given to it - an agency that has, over the years,
housed some of the country’s finest public servants.
Hopefully, the NSI will be assigned responsibility for
data-driven research on a much wider scale than currently applies. There is
nothing more compelling than the disintegration of the CSO over the years to prove
the point that public policy is very frequently developed in the absence of hard
information.
Having moderated just two of the current series of public
consultations on local government reform, it seems clear to me that the design
of a new framework in this important area of governance must be deeply rooted
in a much better understanding of the stock of human and other assets available
in the several districts and regions. Such knowledge would help address fears
linked to social and economic anomalies in the assigning of fiscal
responsibilities. The question has arisen time and again at the consultations.
The Centre for Language Learning (CLL) also recently
launched preliminary work on the mapping of foreign language usage in T&T
and its director, Dr Beverly-Anne Carter, has urged that an audit of language
competencies be included as part of the next national census exercise. The
CLL’s finding that as many as 40 languages are used in households throughout
the country is an astounding revelation with implications for the manner in
which we engage the rest of the world in the spheres of business, commerce and
foreign policy.
As I have said before, though, the politicians need to allow
the professionals to do their work. The seminal achievement of the CSO in developing
the Human Development Atlas of 2012, including vital data on citizen security
provided by the Crime and Problem Analysis Unit (CAPA) of the Police Service,
proved that the agency, once provided with the resources and with politicians
out of the way, is capable of producing high-quality, reliable work.
During the course of one journalistic assignment that
spanned close to two years, I had to rely heavily on social and economic data
provided by the CSO and by the Central Bank. Regular dispatches from the
Central Bank, via its Repo Rate announcements in particular, provided very
decent, basic information while the CSO staff were always willing to offer
clarification and verification to the extent bureaucratically possible.
I am yet to receive an explanation as to why my name
eventually slipped off the Bank’s mailing list, but thankfully the assignment
had by then ended and the requirement of very specific data was no longer as
urgent as it was before. Sourly, I noted then the bottoming out of a descent
occasioned by politically-inspired mayhem.
It should have taken much less than a Moody’s downgrade in
2015 to signal to policymakers the importance of national statistics as the
bedrock of official decision-making. The shameful “recession” debate was rooted
in routine negligence related to official use of facts and data and an absence
of public, and in some regards journalistic, vigilance.
Now that the fete is over and we are back to work (for the
time being), what happens to the CSO/NSI remains a much more urgent headline in
my book than the points earned by the Band of the Year.
