Definitions

Since 2001,

the proportion of prisoners sentenced for drugs in Portugal has fallen from 40% to 15%. In 1999, 3,893 people were incarcerated for drug offences. In 2017, this had fallen to 1,140.

Great you'd say: with more awareness campaigns and governmental support, people are using drugs less.

But there's more to explain this apparent change in drug use.

Drug use itself appears to have remained fairly consistant over the period, even rising slightly in cases. So, what happened?

The definition changed.

Drug Law?30/2000 came into effect July 2001, decriminilasing drug use for addicted individuals.

Through this decree, there was less crime, but reality hadn't changed. Only our conceptualisation had, and conceptualisations are used to cut reality into pieces in order to quantify them.

Counting anything starts with defining it. And defining starts with excluding and including. What is in the 'crime' category? What is in the 'drug' category? And what is an 'addicted individual'?

It is easy to manipulate the numbers, or get confused, without robust and consistent definitions.

Even, for our deeply-loved 'GDP' category

In 2014, Italy's GDP started to climb steadily - after years of decline or stagnation.

It is hard to pinpoint the origin of such a rise - up to 1.67 percentage points. Unemployment actually rose to 12% during the period, and other indicators offer little evidence of growth or momentum.

Where did those billion of euros come from?

You guessed it, a changed definition.

in 2014, Italy decided to include its black market and illegal activities (which could be as big as Portugal's whole economy) in its GDP figures.

The results? Growth.

Yesterday, Italy was a struggling economy, with shooting unemployment and government debt. Today, Italy is growing.

A change of definition transformed the country, from red to green.

Humans define

Although we tend to believe in the objectivity of such quantifications, possibly from a constant reminder by authority figures in the media of their sanctity - they remain human manufactured.

Quantifications are decisions made by us, to conceptualise, to create a group, and arbitrarily start counting what, to us, appears to make sense together.

It is easy to lose sight of the human aspect of such quantification, so let's look at some other examples.

Counting markets

When counting markets 'the market size of bananas' or 'the top brand within beauty and personal care' - defining becomes key.

Because as with crime rate or GDP, a slight change of definition will change the conclusions.

Let's take an example.

Perhaps L'Oreal is said to be the top Beauty and Personal Care brand in the world by a company. This company has its own definition of 'beauty' and applies it to products. According to this definition, L'Oreal is the biggest brand in this category.

Another company, 'Beauty-Inc', is second to L'Oreal. However, they recently launched a product that grew like fire - 89 billion dollars of sales a year in China alone.

The product?

A pill with plant-extracts that gives you a slight tan, and moistures your skin.

So, is this a beauty product? If it is, Beauty-Inc is now the biggest brand in the world of Beauty and Personal Care. If it is not, and perhaps comes under some 'health' categorisation, it is not.

It's not just brands

You might think that brands are more subjective, that there's more room for interpretation, as they include a variety of products.

But the same applies for a single product category.

I love citruses. Oranges, lemons, grapefruits - all of them. Some, are quite similar, let's say tangerines, mandarines, and clementines.

Now, especially with GMO and the advance of science, you need a laser-precise definition in order to quantify these products. You might need to look at the genetic code of the fruit.

But what do you do when a tanger-mandarine show up? A new fruit made half of tangerines and half of mandarines - and what if it's 51% mandarines, or 99%?

You need to make choices, and although the products seem objective and set in stone, our choices of how to count them are not.

Same product, different product

What doesn't make things easier, is that the same products are actually different across regions, countries, and cultures.

Do you define them by their shape, use, colours?

If you only define an object by its use, you will have chopsticks and forks in the same category 'individual food picking devices' - but does this help?

If you over define the object, you may end up with a categorisation that is losing its meaning, it isn't categorising anything, but identifying a single object.

What we need, is a balance between the two - but it comes with its own challenge.

A spectrum

Starting to quantify anything starts with a strong defining exercise. Without this exercise, the quantification cannot take place, and a limited definition offers a limited, and often vague, quantification.

The challenge is that the world is not static.

It is constantly evolving, and generating cross-cutting categories. Destroying the efforts made my humans to count, cut and organise.

This is why Euromonitor International is providing such a valuable service - cross-comparable data across more than 100 countries - and is constantly on the look-out for changes in markets, how products are used, thought about, and classified.

The world seems to pay little attention to our efforts of classifying it. It is down to us to adapt, and by redefining the world, changing our vision of it.