The debate over fake news is no doubt amusing to any attentive journalist capable of sifting evidence. Claiming that much of the news is fake is a little like discovering that water is wet.
It has long been the case that the forces arrayed against the media have been overwhelming, and, with journalistic ranks thinning, there is less and less resistance to spin, disinformation and propaganda. George Orwell's vision in 1984 is beginning to look like old news.
It is not just fake news that is the problem. Increasingly, we live in a world of fake figures, especially of the financial type. There is a cliche in management that 'what gets measured gets done'. In public discourse that might be translated to 'what gets measured is considered real'.
A little thought shows this to be nonsense. If someone claimed that the beauty of Mozart is 145.3 per cent greater than Brahms, it would obviously be ridiculous. But it does not mean such beauty does not exist. It just means that it is not accessible to quantitative measurement.
To push this measurement bias, a distinction is often made between 'anecdotal' and 'quantitative' claims. It is true that stories are necessarily partial. But that does not mean that quantitative measures are the solution. Often, they have even greater problems.
One obvious fake figure is gross domestic product, or GDP, which is taken as a measure of national wellbeing. In fact, it is just a measure of transactions. If money changes hands because something disastrous happens then GDP will rise. The recent tsunami in Japan, for example, led to a rise in that country's GDP. Yet it was hardly an indicator of national wellbeing.
GDP is not even a proper measure of production. As the economist Michael Hudson has noted finance, insurance and real estate do not produce anything; they are parasitical. If they are taken out of GDP it shows most developed economies withering. This is not a new insight; Robert F Kennedy pointed out decades ago that GDP measures 'everything except that which is worthwhile'.
Alternative quantitative measures of national wellbeing rarely convince. For example the Peace Index is superficially impressive, but does not withstand much scrutiny. It is based on normalisation of national statistics, which must be considered a gigantic leap of faith given the poor quality of number collection, especially in poorer countries.
"Any quantitative measurement of human activity often ends up being a precise calculation of nothing at