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Does the government make bad decisions?

It all starts with statistics

In a proper situation the decision makers get as accurate data as possible and according to them build the picture of reality and make the decisions accordingly.

In practice, as the Corona has shown, the data in Israel is a sad joke

Tags

• Corona

• statistics

• Clasp

Avichai Snir

Friday, 02 October 2020, 01:07

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In the video: Netanyahu refers to the indices for ending the closure (Photo: PM spokeswoman)

I talked this week with someone who knows something about data.

He's really furious.

"How can the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Israel issue an estimate that a two-week closure will cost NIS 30 billion and then correct the number to NIS 10 billion?"

I tried to reassure him, and I said mistakes happen.

So he replied that it was not a 10 percent or even 20 percent error, but a 200 percent error.

Decision makers are supposed to make the decisions based on data, he reminded me.

But when they make such mistakes, they do not make decisions based on data, but on the inventions of the officials.

"I have a feeling," he said, "that someone wanted to influence the results, so he invented a statistic that would suit him."

Honestly, I think he's wrong.

I do not think there was any intention here to mislead the decision makers.

I suspect it was just another case where someone in the Treasury was told he needed to give an estimate, that someone asked someone younger to do the assessment, someone younger threw a number, and from that moment on, everyone stopped thinking and clung to that number, no matter how unlikely it was .

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Are we really in the OECD?

There is constant talk of some people breathing because of the corona.

No one mentions the total number of respirators, or the number of respirators in need of respiratory rehabilitation

But I agree with my friend on one thing.

It is very worthwhile for someone in the Ministry of Finance and the Bank of Israel to issue an orderly explanation of how this mistake happened.

Because there is one problem with fabricated data.

After you are caught, they stop believing in you.

Unfortunately, even so, decision makers ignore data and have recently made quite a few decisions that are between bad and really bad.

But if we get to a point where decision makers stop believing the data they get, I think I'll come back to the answer.

If nothing else works, maybe God will help.

Unfortunately, I do not think anyone in the Treasury and the Bank of Israel even thinks of publishing an apology and / or explanation about the process that caused the forecast to fail.

In my opinion, they do not think they should at all, because the officials there are starting to get used to the fact that the public is constantly getting boiled data.

Reminds you that during the discussion in the Corona Committee on whether to close the gyms, the argument arose that there should be no closure because two-thirds of infections at all occur at home.

That may be true, but it's not really interesting.

Infections in the home cannot be prevented, so what is interesting is only the remaining third;

If people do not get infected outside, people will not get infected at home either.

Also mentions that there is constant talk of some people breathing because of the corona.

No one mentions the total number of respirators, or the number of respirators in need of respiratory rehabilitation, although the last two numbers are much more relevant for knowing how close the hospitals are to collapse.

We recently celebrated a decade of Israel's admission to the Club of Developed Countries, the OECD.

To be accepted into this club, a country has to prove that the statistics it produces are at the highest level in the world.

But one of the worst damages Corona does to us is that it makes the public and decision makers suspect (perhaps rightly) that the statistics we get are not at the level of a developed country, but at the level of a banana republic, with each official deciding what figure to report according to his superiors.

And if the government makes decisions based on data at the level of the Banana Republic, do not be surprised if the decisions are also at a level that is appropriate for the Banana Republic.

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