COLUMNISTS “When you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind.” This observation scores high on the list of silly remarks made by clever men, to which its author, Lord Kelvin, made several sterling contributions. The knowledge possessed by Plato and Shakespeare, Austen and Darwin was neither meagre nor unsatisfactory.
Bogus quantification attempts to compress complex problems and analyses into single observations. The annual report of the United Nations Human Development Programme is an entirely admirable endeavour. The agency focuses on three broad dimensions of development – health, education and material standard of living – and reports on progress towards these goals among UN members.
