Politics & Power Quote by Josiah Stamp

Stamp’s jab lands because it mimics the cadence of bureaucratic self-importance: collect, add, exponentiate, extract roots, then unveil “wonderful diagrams” as if mathematical gymnastics automatically equals understanding. The line is funny in a dry, accountant-adjacent way, but it’s also an accusation. Statistics, he implies, can become a ceremonial language of governance: impressive, technical, and—crucially—safe. Safe because the spectacle of quantification can substitute for the messy work of judgment, priorities, and accountability.

The intent isn’t anti-math; it’s anti-mystique. By piling up operations (“nth power,” “cube root”) he satirizes the performative complexity that can be used to launder assumptions into “findings.” The diagrams are “wonderful” not because they’re truthful, but because they’re persuasive artifacts—visual authority that makes policy feel inevitable rather than chosen. Stamp is pointing at an old political trick: if you can make a decision look like a calculation, you can dodge the moral and social arguments underneath it.

Context sharpens the edge. Stamp lived through the high tide of state administration and economic planning in early 20th-century Britain, when government’s capacity to measure populations, trade, employment, and health was expanding fast. A businessman and public servant familiar with institutions that worship ledgers, he’s warning that measurement can become an end in itself. The subtext: data is power, and the people who control the metrics can shape reality—sometimes more effectively than they can improve it.