This pressure is especially evident now with so many hotly contested social and economic transformations under way, some only in their early stages. Although Washington places talismanic power in numbers as it tries to judge the good or bad of such changes, statistics have often proved a false god. In the national obsession with market statistics, quarterly profits and the won-loss column, government and private experts find themselves trying to measure the largely unmeasurable. They attempt to apply the scientific method to questions that do not lend themselves to simple quantification. In the name of accuracy or advocacy, they fashion a veneer of seeming numerical certainty over what are fundamentally questions of belief.
Governments try, every day.
Whole bureaus are devoted to assessing the costs and benefits of programs based solely on numbers. Thus welfare reform is declared a success because the rolls are dropping by more than 100,000 people a month. New air-quality standards are justified at any cost because they will supposedly prevent precisely 15,000 deaths a year from respiratory ailments. You take a hundred-dimensional problem like welfare reform and reduce it to one number. Robert Reischauer of the Brookings Institution, an economist who oversaw the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 to 1995 and was thus Capitol Hill's chief scorekeeper, said that today's obsession with numbers is an overreaction to the past, when public officials were not held accountable for the results of their actions.