Bad Moves entry

Bad Moves: Taking credit

By Julian Baggini

"I could recite you the statistics: The lowest inflation, mortgage rates, and unemployment for decades. The best ever school results, with over 60,000 more 11 year olds every year now reaching required standards in English and Maths. Cardiac deaths down 19 per cent since 1997, cancer deaths 9 per cent. Burglaries down 39 per cent."
Tony Blair, Labour Party Conference speech, 30 September 2003

What do you want from your government? Many would say, chiefly: security, the efficient management of the economy and the delivery of public services. What then can a government do to defend its record other than list the ways it has delivered? This is what Tony Blair did in his speech to this year's Labour Party conference.

Of course, the speech would have left out any statistics that did not show the government in a good light. The Conservatives claim, for example, that average waits for an operation on the National Health Service have increased from 90 to 96 days over the past three years and that the number of beds in English hospitals has fallen by 10,000 since Labour came to power.

But even the statistics that Blair did cite don't necessarily provide evidence of good governance. Labour surely does deserve some credit for the low mortgage, inflation and unemployment rates. Although the 'best ever school results' could possibly be the result of more lenient marking, it also seems fair to attribute at least some of the improvements to government policy. But elsewhere, is Blair guilty of taking undeserved credit for improvements that would have happened anyway, or are actually signs of poor performance?

It certainly looks like it. Take the reduction in cancer deaths. The fact is that the long-term trend throughout the developing world is for such a reduction and Britain's 9% drop is only in line with European averages. (see this BBC news item or very detailed stats here to put the UK figures in perspective.) So the UK government has only been performing at best averagely, and arguably has had little direct control over the long to medium term trends at all.

It's a similar story with cardiac deaths. The British Heart Foundation reports that "while the death rate has been falling in the UK, it has not been falling as fast as in some other countries."

Even in the case of crime it is hard to disentangle the effects of government policy from factors outside its control, such as demography. For example, the higher the proportion of young men in the population, the higher crime rates tend to be.

Blair is only doing what politicians of all stripes have always done. If something good happens while they are in power, they try to take credit for it. (Conversely, if something bad happens they try to show it was not their fault.) The implicit non sequitur is "if something good happens while I'm in charge, it is because of my actions."

As a rhetorical move it can be effective, partly because humans instinctively understand the world as operating according to causal principles and, as David Hume argued, it's a good job that we do. After all, we only ever directly observe conjunctions of events, not the causal links between them. Our minds thus have to fill in the gaps if we are to understand the world causally at all. But the downside of this is that we can easily mistake non-causal conjunctions for causal ones. Success under a certain regime is thus easily mistaken for success because of a regime.

Unfairly taking the credit (or the blame) in such manner is not restricted to the political sphere. Consider the implied causal claims in the following: "Since we've been married, your career has shot ahead, while mine has stagnated." Or, "There has not been a single fatality in this factory all the time I've been the manager." Or how about, "The man who won five of the six major championships played between August 1999 and April 2001 with Titleist equipment has won only two of the last seven, and none of the last five, with the Nike driver in the bag." That man is Tiger Woods.

It is not that we know Blair's government deserves no credit for improved health stats or that the Nike clubs are just an excuse for Woods' slump. It's just that in both cases credit or blame is being dished out on the basis of a causal link that just hasn't been established.

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