The struggles of the Office for National Statistics illustrate the struggles of the British state
How do societies collapse?
That depends, of course, on who you ask. Whilst it’s commonly assumed that Edward Gibbon put the collapse of the Roman Empire down mostly to the moral decadence of its people, he actually blamed the Romans’ “immoderate greatness”, which “introduced a slow and secret poison into the vitals of the empire”. Thus, the Romans were overwhelmed by one wave of Barbarians after the other. It was all so simple that Gibbon thought we should “rather be surprised that it had subsisted so long”, than it fell at all.
The anthropologist Joseph Tainter, however, argues that the burdens of complexity broke the Western Roman Empire. Faced with constant military crises and limited reserves, the heavily taxed Roman Empire resorted to debasing its silver currency to raise funds. In the third century A.D., emperors doubled the army and expanded government, triggering rampant inflation. To finance this, they flooded the economy with worthless coins, seized supplies from peasants, and raised taxes to crippling levels — up to two-thirds of net yield.
The empire surveyed land and population for taxation, holding communities collectively responsible. As peasants starved or sold their children, the state built fortifications, expanded the imperial bureaucracy and paid gold subsidies to marauding barbarian tribes. Rising taxes led to abandoned lands and precipitous population decline as the wealthy fled urban duties for rural estates, while peasants, seeking relief, entered feudal bonds with landowners.
For Tainter, the Empire exemplified how escalating complexity, introduced to solve mounting problems, generates higher costs and diminishing returns. As its administrative layers became more burdensome, its resource demands increased, which the Empire met by consuming its capital resources, primarily agriculturally productive land and its peasant population. “In the end,” Tainter argued, “it could no longer afford to solve the problems of its own existence.”
For several years, there has been growing concern about the collapse of Western society. A key part of this concern has been the perceived frailty of Western economies; as a result there has been a widespread — though not universal — acceptance of the need for “resilience” to be rebuilt in Western economies. Energy independence, supply chain redundancy, and reshoring have all been touted as safeguards to protect from external systemic shocks that Western nations have overexposed themselves to.
But the problems of complexity are not just the result of globalisation, but internal contradictions within Western societies too.
As an example, what could be better than the recent warning from the Royal Economic Society that the Office for National Statistics (ONS) data is so bad economists can’t analyse the British economy properly. “Gaps in labour market data are preventing economists from properly analysing wages, employment, inequality and the effects of government policy,” the Royal Economic Society warned, “Recent delays, revisions and errors in core datasets, including labour market figures and household surveys, have raised questions about the credibility of UK statistics.”
A review last year identified fearful “inadequacies” in the way the agency plans and makes decisions. Sir Robert Devereux, who led the review, concluded that “most of the well-publicised problems with core economic statistics are the consequence of ONS’s own performance,” in particular “choices made at the top of ONS, over several years”. He also noted that “interest in the new” was detracting from the more understated but indispensable work of delivering economic metrics capable of supporting high-quality decisions.
In 2006, the headquarters of the ONS was moved from London to Newport, Wales, as the result of the Lyons Review on public sector relocation. In his introduction, Lyons made it clear that the review was not conducted with the aim of improving the function of government departments, but to meet political ends, in this case “reduced disparity in the economic fortunes of the regions; national competitiveness; and devolution”.
The ONS maintained that by recruiting and training skilled personnel in South Wales, where data collection and analysis were already established, it could safeguard service quality. However, critics argued that transferring functions to Newport and closing the London office could jeopardize the future integrity of several key statistics, primarily due to the anticipated reluctance of experienced specialists in these technically demanding areas to relocate, raising the prospect of significant expertise loss and a corresponding decline in statistical quality. In its submission to the Parliamentary Treasury Sub-Committee, the Bank of England echoed these apprehensions, warning that “the relocation programme poses serious risks to the maintenance of the quality of macroeconomic data. If substantial numbers of ONS staff are unwilling to relocate, the loss of skilled individuals could have a severe impact on a range of statistics”. Clearly, the Bank knew better.
Placing political mores above core competencies in an institution that performs such a vital economic function as the ONS is a disaster
In a monumental piece for Palladium two years ago, Harold Robertson predicted that one of the most pressing issues for America was a crisis in competency causing a collapse in complex systems. “The core issue,” he argued, “is that changing political mores have established the systematic promotion of the unqualified and sidelining of the competent. This has continually weakened our society’s ability to manage modern systems.”
Placing political mores above core competencies in an institution that performs such a vital economic function as the ONS is a disaster because, to return to Tainter, a society’s ability to endure or tendency to collapse hinges on the effectiveness of its problem-solving institutions. Collapse, he argues, occurs when investments in social complexity and the energy that sustains them yield diminishing marginal returns, and will be manifested in the involuntary shedding of a substantial share of that complexity. Given the ONS has already stopped publishing many of its datasets due to its concerns about their validity, we may already be witnessing the early signs of that shedding in our problem-solving institutions. The Roman Empire did not collapse in a single event, but over the course of hundreds of years, amidst a slow retreat of quiet omissions and deferred responsibilities. But at least we won’t be able to measure how bad things will be.
