Guest post by Mike Lewis
One of this blog’s foundational themes is that economic facts don’t mean much without an analysis of power. At the same time, over the last fifteen years I’ve watched big NGOs develop specific ways to wield economic facts, perhaps even to fetishise them, as a way of influencing power. With the new government favouring a similar “numberism” , it seems a good moment to consider this technique’s challenges.
Consider the first speech of the UK’s new Chancellor on 8 July. Light on policy content, but with guaranteed cut-through thanks to a mega-number: £140 billion, the GDP “foregone” by the UK economy not growing as fast, on average, as OECD economies over the last 14 years. Plus a side-serving of fiscal black hole: £58 billion of resulting “missing” tax revenues.
It’s obvious how the £140/58bn figures are calculated: OECD growth figures from the World Bank or another sources, applied to 2010 UK GDP, then 2023 UK GDP subtracted. Then multiply this ‘foregone’ GDP to the UK’s tax take/GDP ratio. It takes about 90 seconds with a spreadsheet…something like this:
Reeves’ speech claimed that these figures came instead from “new Treasury analysis I commissioned over the weekend”. Yet Reeves used exactly the same £140bn figure in a lecture she gave in a lecture four months ago. It doesn’t rely on undisclosed data newly dredged from the archives at Horse Guard’s Road.
It’s equally obvious why this “new analysis” performance is useful for the new government: they can argue that they’ve had austerity thrust upon them, having opened their predecessors’ books.
Of course, British politics is littered with big numbers: a £2000 tax bill for every family, £350m a week for the NHS. But the Chancellor’s double rhetorical move (a surprising statistic dramatised as ‘new research’) feels like something particular: the “killer fact” beloved of big British development NGOs of the 2000s and 2010s. I know, because I used to write them.
NGOs have the same media problem as everyone else – the need for an impressive fact to get ‘cut-through’ – but also one that governments don’t face: if an NGO says something, it isn’t actually news, even if it’s interesting. NGO comms departments of the mid-2000s had two standard responses to this problem. First, get a celebrity to say it instead. Preferably Bill Nighy. Second, say that your surprising number is the result of “new research”. Words like “new” or “undisclosed” mean that the big number fits with newsrooms’ (fairly arbitrary) criteria for making something reportable.
This blog’s own Duncan Green originally coined the phrase “killer facts”, after getting media cut-through at a 2000s global summit with the factoid that every cow in the EU gets more subsidy than the income of half the world’s population. Oxfam GB’s Research Department codified “killer facts” comms rules in an (excellent) 2012 guide, prefaced with Duncan’s telling (though correct) sentence: “The right killer fact can have more impact than the whole of a well-researched report.”
The cow stat wasn’t new research, of course, nor claimed as such: it’s simply an arresting fact generated by taking the figure for EU dairy subsidies and realising it comes to about $2 a day. The arresting fact alone can be used for a compelling op-ed. But to make compelling number-crunching into a news story required, well, something “new”. Much like that staple of corporate newsvertising, the “new opinion poll finds”. Eight out of ten cats prefer…but for global poverty.
As a toiler in policy departments of UK development NGOs in the early 2010s, I remember the pressure from well-meaning press officers for a killer fact they could retail to journalists as ‘new research’. Figures for international tax avoidance were particularly susceptible, because they quantified something deliberately invisible: what Jim Henry memorably called “an exercise in night vision…trying to measure…the economic equivalent of an astrophysical black hole”.
Like astrophysical black holes, the numbers got very big. But the fact of making big numbers wasn’t itself problematic. Rather, it was that in the endless internal war between reluctant policy wonks and hard-pressed media officers, our policy briefs’ caveats and provisos usually got stripped away in the press release. And, inevitably, ‘calculation’ segued into ‘research’.
So: three cautionary tales from my own experience of “killer facts”. First, killer fact inflation. Once you’ve put a big number or a shocking ratio on a problem, if you want continued attention then you can’t make it go down, only up. In my area, tackling one particular activity, corporate tax avoidance, eventually became the answer to funding everything: hunger, disease, all public services.
Second, falling back on killer facts, especially if presented as exclusive research, means that the debate becomes about the numbers, not the policy. A lot of the criticism our big numbers got wasn’t fair, or dispassionate. But we spent a huge amount of time defending them.
Worst of all: you start to believe your own big numbers. In our case, an unreasonable focus on the fiscal potential of tackling corporate tax avoidance meant that more fundamental tax policy – including increasing tax rates on wealth and very high incomes – got sidelined for many years. You can see this specific issue in the 2024 Labour Party manifesto, which claims it can fund nearly half of its (admittedly modest) spending promises through tackling ‘tax avoidance’ and the carried interest loophole. Can HMRC’s inspectors really find £6bn down the back of the fiscal sofa? The IFS isn’t alone in thinking it pretty unlikely.
The Chancellor recently delivered the fuller results of Labour’s performative rummaging in the desk drawers at the Treasury. Although this seems more based on real Treasury analysis than special adviser spreadsheets, her opponents have predictably managed to mobilise doubts about dressing up known economic facts as newly discovered black holes – thereby sidestepping real debates about real economic difficulties.
Meanwhile open-source ‘killer facts’ dressed up as research or undisclosed government data conceals policy as economic exigency. From someone who knows, it’s a strategy that can come back to bite.