FIGURES AND BUSINESS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 191, 14 August 1925, Page 6

FIGURES AND BUSINESS.

Every journalist who has to work ' among the forest of reports and returns issued by the Government must wonder sometimes whether all this trouble and expense is worth while. Heavy blue books, the laying of which on the table in Wellington must reverberate through the Dominion; page after page of returns about everything under our southern sun; from bees to para-typhoid, from the number of births at one place to the number of hens at another—how many men and women study these things and what is the value of the conclusions to be drawn from them? We are led to make these remarks by an address that the Government Statistician gave in Wellington the other da}'. Mr. Fraser lives among statistics. He edits our Year Book, and is responsible for the "Monthly Abstract." Consequently when he tells business men that they should make more use of statistics, he should be listened to attentively. "To-day no big business was successfully run without its statistics of a more or less complete or incomplete character," said Mr. Fraser. "The operations of the big business enterprises of to-day had increased enormously in complexity and detail. The modern executive head of a large business was a man freed from detail, concentrating on the formulation of plans and policies based on adequate data, and be could keep in touch with his business satisfactorily only through the maintenance of an adequate system of statistical records." This is all very true. Management can be reduced to the point of fineness reached in a great London catering firm, whose factory profit in buns is only two shillings a thousand, and which has found that to put it hundredth part too much into a quarterpound packet of tea is a serious matter. In business, as well as polities, statistics should be given more importance. Mr. Fraser realises, however, that it is one thing to compile statistics, and another thing to make good use of them. When Mr. Micawber made his famous financial statement he was both a statistician and a moralist: "Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen and six; result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six. result misery." We know how much practical application Mr. Micawber gave this sound principle. On the other hand it is possible to overload a business with statistics and system generally. In a business run really efficiently there is a properly organised collection of statistics, and the heads of the concern are able to interpret and apply the figures. In politics the Minister and the member are expected to interpret and annly, but apart from the question of ability, they are often too busy to do this. It is to the economist and the sociologist that we must turn for the interpretation of much of the mass of national statistics that grows greater every year. Unfortunately there are not many persons who are capable of doing such work and have the time for it.