By TK Chua
It is just so funny. When our ranking in a corruption index is down, someone in authority decides to formulate and start our own index to gauge the country’s performance in the fight against corruption.
Before this, we heard of arguments like “I did it my way” and “Development following our own mould” whenever we wanted to justify going against international norms or standards.
We behave as if our country is under constant siege. We hold on to the notion that other countries are jealous of our success. Their criticism and negative comments were motivated by bad intentions and jealousy.
Seriously, if we find a country doing better than we are, are we going to argue that the methodology used in the study was faulty? Are we going to say that the comparative study used the wrong criteria? I think there would be no end to this.
Comparative studies must meet objective, independent and verifiable criteria. Otherwise, they are “shiok sendiri” studies.
When we conduct our own performance study, we violate objectivity because we are an interested party.
We can claim heaven and earth in our efforts to achieve certain targets, but ultimately it is not for us to trumpet.
We can’t set our own criteria and then use the results to compare our performance with other countries. That would be comparing apples with oranges.
We can’t pre-establish performance targets and then find criteria and measurements that are able to support such targets. That would be dishonesty and cheating.
Sometimes we can be delusional about our efforts. We think we are doing a great job by focusing 80% of our resources on solving only 20% of our problems. That is input-driven, not output or outcome orientation. We are pretending to be busy. Alternatively, we are busy over nothing.
There is another reason why we like to have our own studies and performance indices. We try to hide our deficiencies and weaknesses in statistical/empirical mumbo jumbo.
My suggestion is for us to refrain from indulging in meaningless studies. Nowadays, people are very aware, not just of fake news, but also of “faulty” studies.
TK Chua is an FMT reader.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of FMT.