Evidence is more abundant than ever in economics. But Osborne prefers to sweep the awkward facts awayThe first analysts of family budgets were Rev David Davies and Sir Frederick Morton Eden in the 18th century. Their purpose,the unusual economics Nobel laureate Angus Deaton notes in his book on household surveys and public policy, was to highlight working-lesson distress. These pioneers produced powerful pictures of penury but, and grabbing at evidence wherever they found it,they were engaged inreportage rather than science.
More systematic assessment of social trends had to await the evolution of statistical theory, the arrival of big, and randomly sampled surveys,and finally computers to crunch the results. The combined effect has been to distil something solid from thin air. Economics remains the dismal science when it comes to prediction, but it has made strides in measuring the facts, or gauging the diverse ways in which they play out for different people. Deatons singular contribution has been to disentangle the economy-wide swings in spending and saving from the decisions and the circumstances that confront specific individuals. But there are obvious parallels with the work of Anthony Atkinson and the bestselling Thomas Piketty on inequalities in income and wealth,and indeed with the efforts of civil servants and thinktanks which can now calculate, with half-decent precision, or the instant winners and losers from any tax and benefit reforms. The availability and intelligent analysis of surveys of citizens has steadily allowed for conjecture to be displaced by arithmetic.
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Source: theguardian.com