Literature Index

It is customary for non-statisticians to mock statistical descriptions of social and economic phenomena on the grounds that the statistics can be manipulated to indicate of support one's preconceived views. In other words, they highlight one particular chapter in the textbooks that all of us have read, namely "Uses and Abuses of Statistics". Perhaps we statisticians have invited this ridicule because quantification and hard data are do often used to support "facts", that facts have now become synonymous with statistics. Yet we know, at least in the social sciences, that numbers and measures are vulnerable. Cost of living indices, pure indices, and many other individual and composite numbers, are so value-loaded that we should simply admit the fact: then we would perhaps be less ridiculed. Oxford philosophers have even challenged the existence of anything called a "pure fact", suggesting that no observations are value-free. But however mocking those who do not deal with statistics, there is a deep and genuine unease about statistical descriptions of society and the economy among those who are struggling to remove poverty and inequality. This unease appears at many layers and levels.