As we can’t why not stop?
In December the ONS pushed back the publication of the overhauled labour market statistics to 2027, the latest of several postponements from spring 2024.
The statistics agency has sought to improve the monthly survey owing to a sharp drop in response rates — down to record low of 12.7 per cent in the three months to September 2023 from about 50 per cent a decade ago.
So we’re not gaining the data to be able to do detailed management of the economy.
The response rate to the Department for Work and Pensions’ Family Resources Survey sank to only 25 per cent in the most recent year from 60 per cent 15 years ago.
We’re really not gaining the data necessary to do detailed economic management.
Another survey crucial to the agency’s monthly GDP estimates, the Living Costs and Food Survey, has also suffered a tumbling response rate to a record low of 22 per cent last year from about 60 per cent at the turn of the millennium.
We’re really, really, not gaining…..
So, let’s just stop then. As we can’t get the data - something that as Hayek pointed out will never be good enough anyway - we can and should just stop doing that detailed economic management.
One possibility is that people might go off and do something economically useful instead of dodging filling out ONS surveys.
We do though have a decent example from elsewhere. Hong Kong went, post-war, from grossly poorer than the UK to wildly richer. Sir John Cowperthwaite, the fiscal manager during that process, banned anyone from collecting even GDP statistics. On the grounds that “some damn fool will only want to do something with them”.
Or as we were told a quarter of a millennium ago, peace, easy taxes and the tolerable administration of justice.
Well, quite, let us gain that highest degree of opulence by banning this lowest barbarism of data.
Tim Worstall