Juking the Stats: World Bank Edition
How far would you go for Multilateralism?
Many of you know that I have a strong Love:Hate relationship with ranked lists, also known as, listicles. I hate them because they’re inherently unfalsifiable and love them, of course, because I’m a deeply closeted elitist. It’s deeply gratifying to point to an artifact like ranking and say, “My preferred thing is objectively (but actually totally subjectively) better than your preferred thing. Go Fuck Yourself, plebe.”
This story is about a ranked list, an allegedly prestigious international institution full of people who think they’re more important than they are, and the Chinese Communist Party exerting some leverage. We’re checking a lot of boxes with this one.
Here’s the short version:
Some Very Important People™ at the World Bank were passing around the collection plate to raise funds to perpetuate whatever it is the World Bank thinks they do (which doesn’t include their employees paying taxes). In the face of pushback against their self important tithe, the World Bank CEO actually said the words “multilateralism was at stake”. I hope to have a job one day where I can ask people for money and if they push back I can respond with some pretentious shit like “John, our multilateralism is at stake” and John continues to take me seriously as a human being.
Ok, back to the story. China didn’t like the terms of the fundraise and since multilateralism was at stake, they decided to exert some leverage in the form of the asking for a better ranking in next year’s World Bank Doing Business report. The Doing Business report is just some think tank-ish ranking of the ease of doing business across every country. I’ve looked at the report and I don’t think it supersedes common sense. If you really think it’s easier to do business in Korea (#5) than Australia (#15), then you’re going to be really surprised when you learn how Chaebol work. And if you think the Philippines (#99) is harder than Bhutan (#73), it’s going to blow your mind when you learn that foreigners aren’t really a thing in Bhutan so good luck with immigrant labor, multinational corporations, and trade.
So this conflict between China, who has all the leverage, and the World Bank, who loves multilateralism, plays out pretty predictably. The data gets collected, analyzed, and China’s rank drops from 78 to 85. World Bank President Kim finds out and writes an email saying, “I think I’m going to cry”. Poor guy.
And thus Task Force Juke Those Stats begins and the World Bank CEO (different person than the World Bank President but honestly doesn’t matter too much to the arc of this shitshow) begins to “ensure” that China’s reforms are “adequately acknowledged” in the report. The Task Force starts their shuffling with all sorts of weightings of untampered raw data. While China’s raw numbers had in fact improved the reshuffling doesn’t work because everyone’s raw data has improved. Apparently the world is Doing Business better across the board. I do think this is where the Task Force fucked up because if there had been some social psychologists on staff finding an effect amongst noise would not have been a problem. In their failure to improperly use statistical methods, the CEO ultimately pressures her employees to change the underlying data. Problem solved.
The CEO meets with the dude in charge of Department of Juking Reports and thanks him for doing his “bit for multilateralism”. That’s another no-shit, actual quote. She then visits the house of the guy who created Doing Business ostensibly to retrieve a physical copy in his driveway and thank him for “resolv[ing] the problem”. When asked about this after hours visit, she admits this is the only time she has ever visited the personal home of an employee. That’s something former IMF CEO Domique Strauss Kahn could never say when he was sleeping with his subordinates. So I guess the World Bank is a more professional workplace than the IMF. Congrats, I guess?
So I wanted to make a racist joke about how this boondoggle plays into the East Asian trope of grade obsession (this entire paper drill was over something like 5 rank spots) but everything I just wrote for the China incident happened again for Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Azerbaijan. Thanks for interrupting my system of prejudice, World Bank.
The main goon juking all the stats in the name of multilateralism was Simeon Djankov whose management style was described as “psychological terrorism” “by terror and intimidation”. I find two things hilarious about this guy: 1) he founded the Doing Business report so you can just imagine what other shenanigans have gone on in those rankings over the years and 2) he has exactly 1 connection on LinkedIn who must be either his mother or Satan. Terrible people, Dumb games, Stupid prizes. Multilateralism at its finest.
The long version of the story (but only 16 pages) comes to us from the fine folks at WilmerHale who did the investigation and, really guys, thank you.
This is fantastic. Had no idea how many relied on this report until I dove further. It's a big deal!