Claus Moser and the LSE legacy

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Claus Moser, whose obituary appeared in early September 2015, received many tributes about the way he “did so much to enrich Britain economically and culturally after the Second World War”. He was a polymath; a man of empathy and scholarship; a gifted pianist; a director of the Royal Opera House; and a Master of an Oxford college, picking up a knighthood and peerage along the way. 

In such a glittering life, Moser’s contribution to our activities perhaps had less mention. But for market researchers, his 20-year tenure at the London School of Economics (LSE) – where he became professor of social statistics – was seminal to the development of survey methodology. His subsequent appointment by Harold Wilson as registrar general, meanwhile, helped to establish the value and independence of statistics.

For several years after 1945, LSE was pivotal in developing survey techniques. Claus was part of a hot-house of new ideas about social administration that brought him into contact with luminaries such as Mark Abrams, Maurice Kendall, Alan Stuart, Richard Titmuss, Peter Willmot and Michael Young. That decisions in this area should be evidence-based was an important tenet for Claus. His book, Survey Methods in Social Investigation ( 1958 ) – written with the involvement of Tom Cauter and John Downham – was groundbreaking work and a very helpful reference at a time when many of us were learning these ‘new’ methods. His book with W Scott, British Towns: a Statistical Study of Their Social and Economic Differences ( 1961 ), led to Acorn, CACI and other classification systems. Many of the methods we take for granted originated at the LSE; although the projects were social in nature, they spilled over into the commercial sector.

As registrar general, Moser presided over some major changes: the General Household Survey and the Labour Force Survey are ongoing testaments to him. But perhaps the most important was to insist on the independence of the Government Statistical Service. He put his job on the line rather than agree to delaying the publication of a statistic that might have been inconvenient to the government of the day. That kind of intellectual independence has contributed to the ethos that underlies the principles on which contemporary market researchers hope to collect and present results.

Moser’s comment, “Education costs money, but then so does ignorance”, fits with his belief that good-quality statistics can educate policy-makers, and they should not be amenable to the whims of political masters. The MRS in Britain is the largest group of practitioners in the world. That position has come about, in part, through the legacy of Moser and others at the LSE. He set some good examples; we would be wise to aspire to them.

Geoffrey Roughton is a fellow of MRS and CEO of X-MR