Winston Churchill once illustrated the comparatives, bad, worse, worst, with a parallel, ‘lies, damned lies and statistics.’
I was reminded of this recently while wandering in the rocky hills of Yemen where, at first glance, you’d suspect that some dietary deficiency afflicted the locals with physical disfigurement. You can accept that no well-dressed tribesmen would be seen dead without a phallic rhino-horn handled knife in his belt and an AK47 on his shoulder, but why did they all have one cheek bulging in a goitred fashion?
It takes about ten minutes to discover that chewing the qat (pronounced ‘cat’) is what people do together in Yemen once the sun is over the yard-arm. Their cheeks are stuffed with the tenderest, greenest shoots of the qat bush which, despite all my best chomping, gave me less buzz than a big cup of strong coffee. Well, ‘Whatever turns you on,’ as we used to say in my student days, paraphrasing the more classical De gustibus non disputandum est.
And qat certainly turns the Yemenis on. More than 20 per cent of their desperately needed water and agricultural land is devoted to growing the bush. And the high value of the crop can be judged by counting the number of the round stone watchtowers looming over each green field to avert qat-rustling.
The growing, harvesting, and distribution of the qat, which has to be chewed fresh, is obviously a major course of employment in the country and indeed possibly the major private sector employer. An ordinary working Yemeni will spend around a third of his wages on bundles of the leafy twigs, so we are talking about a major slice of the country’s impoverished economy. Indeed, the ubiquitous blue plastic bags in which it is sold can be seen blowing around the dry wastelands, trapped on cacti and scrub like hardy desert flowers.
Deep in the Hadramaut, where the sere winds blast in from the sand dunes of the Empty Quarter, the local chamber of commerce was having a trade fair, where the local licencees of Rothmans cigarettes, as well as the makers of several local brands, displayed their wares. The UN Development Programme’s man in Sanaa’s Onder Yucer, let the qat out of the bag. He assured me that nicotine fixes were in the GDP figures, but the World Bank would not count any of the thriving economic activity based on the qat trade.
It was nasty, narcotic stuff they felt, unfit to be enumerated by an agency prone to political ambush by moralising congressmen in Washington. Indeed their attitude was typified by an editor residing in that very same city. Called up by a colleague in Yemen he remembered, ‘Hey, they smoke that qat stuff there don’t they?’ We told our colleague to say that they snorted it, and that there were many deaths from nasal congestion but, her desire for continuing employment outweighing her sense of fun, she demurred.
But where does this moralism stop? Can you imagine the effect on the highlands of Scotland if teetotal Presbyterian bankers refused to count distilling of fine malts as a legitimate and recordable activity? Or the effect on Richmond, Virginia if tobacco cultivation were given the statistical cold shoulder?
Better still, consider that during prohibition in the US, all the figures suggest that the amount of drinking, and therefore presumably the employment in the drink trade, actually went up at a time when it was illegal. Speaking speculatively, could it be possible that in fact there was no depression in the 1930s and that economic activity was just as high but was not recorded?
Of course, lots of people have strong memories of an actual depression, so there must have been some form of economic fall back. And no-one seriously doubts that there was. But it was precipitated by a crisis of confidence in the financial markets. Would their confidence have been boosted if someone had been recording all of that frenetic activity by Al Capone Inc, and it had been reflected in the statistics? In fact, you will remember that the ill-fated Alphonse went down for evasion of taxes on income that was probably being ignored by the very government that was trying to tax him on it.
Since the markets now determine the fate of the economies, and since experience of, for example, Internet stocks, shows that the market makers tend to be as gullible as goats following a Judas goat to the slaughter house, there is a great potential to boost the economy when the next recession threatens. Just factor in all the illegal activity in the Bronx and the South side of Chicago; throw in the marijuana growers of West Virginia; and you could engineer a boom. Indeed, tax them all, and you’d probably pay off the deficit.
There is even a precedent of sorts. The Italian government ten years or so ago decided that tax evasion was so prevalent that its economy was much larger than the numbers showed. So it added a huge arbitrary figure, deduced that Italy had overtaken Britain as an economic power and proclaimed Il Sorpasso, to great national rejoicing.
Italy spoilt the effect a little by basing its dues to the EU and the UN on the official statistics, but since not rendering to Caesar is a national sport, it would have been unpatriotic for Rome to have done anything else, really, wouldn’t it?
