As Hong Kong's Financial Secretary from 1961 to 1971, Sir John Cowperthwaite sent Whitehall statisticians home rather than let the colony collect macroeconomic data:

Asked by Milton Friedman in 1963 why he refused to gather national accounts, Cowperthwaite answered, "If I let them compute those statistics, they'll want to use them for planning"—turning descriptive metrics into tariffs, subsidies, and industrial gates. Over his decade in office without national statistics or industrial policy, Hong Kong's real wages rose 50%, acute poverty fell from 50% to 15%, and per-capita income climbed from 25% of the British level in 1961 to surpassing the United Kingdom by the early 1990s.