BOOK REVIEW / SCIENCE : Can Government Improve Quality of Life? : THE TYRANNY OF NUMBERS: Mismeasurement and Misrule, <i> by Nicholas Eberstadt</i> , The AEI Press,$24.95 cloth, $16.95 paper; 328 pages

When I started reading “The Tyranny of Numbers,” I had very high hopes for it. Alas, this is not the first time I have been disappointed.

But the book is not without value. It’s just that what the author delivers is neither what he promised nor what I expected.

In the opening chapter, Nicholas Eberstadt, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, lays out a powerful case against government-as-problem-solver and government-as-social-engineer.

He notes that it is only fairly recently in human history that people have come to believe that government can and should take steps to improve social welfare.

He points out that the idea of an activist government comes from the Enlightenment--the 17th- and 18th-Century turn to reason as the prime source of knowledge--and from the two centuries of scientific, technological and medical progress that followed.

Those two centuries of achievement made people believe that reason could be used to improve the human condition as well. This, in turn, led to the belief that government should actively address its citizens’ social and economic problems, which, in due course, led to the welfare state.

In the United States, the idea of government as social benefactor took hold during the New Deal in the 1930s and is under serious challenge today.

Unfortunately, reason has not been nearly as successful in the social realm as it is in science and technology.

At the outset, it seems that Eberstadt is going to attack the basic idea of a modern, interventionist government. “How much can the problem-solving state actually know, or learn, about the world that it is assigned to affect and actively improve?” he asks.

“Not so many generations ago,” he writes, “the idea of a progressive and problem-solving state would have sounded amazing and implausible to all but a tiny fringe. That such states are now commonplace attests to how much in our own world was unforeseen only a short while ago.”

So I drew up my chair and gave heed, thinking that Eberstadt was going to unleash a deep and profound attack on the underpinnings of contemporary society.

Well, not quite.

For what follows is a detailed--some might say too detailed--analysis of the number-gathering and number-crunching that provide the basis for modern social policies.

In short, Eberstadt says that the “statistics” about social welfare are wrong: We are not as ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-nourished as we have been led to believe.

“Some of the economic indexes commonly used today to depict the degree of poverty in the United States provide little insight into the physical and material well-being of the poor,” he says. “There is less physical poverty in the United States today than a generation ago.”

As a result, to the extent that public policies seek to ameliorate poverty, those policies are misplaced, if not harmful.

He does not stop there. Have you heard the alarming statistics about infant mortality in the United States? Why are we last among industrialized nations? Something must be wrong with our health-care system.

Not so, says Eberstadt. The numbers are misleading, and the policies set up to address them are wrong.

What, then, is his argument? At the outset, he takes aim at the very idea that government should try to improve its citizens’ lot. He further asserts that policies based on statistics have led to “a tyranny of numbers” and “mismeasurement and misrule.”

But in the end, his argument is different. He says that policy-makers have the wrong data.

If they had the right data, which Eberstadt seeks to give them, would “the tyranny of numbers” disappear, or would they just substitute one set for another?

Eberstadt says in several places that the ability of government to change social conditions is much more limited than many people believe. In fact, that’s really what he wants to argue. But he does it obliquely, through all this business about the data being wrong.

If he wants to make a political argument against government-for-social-betterment, why doesn’t he just come out and say so?