Revolt against autistic economics: '"It may work fine in practice," goes a joke that the French make at their own expense. "The trouble is, it just doesn't work in theory." ...Could this ...prove the beginning of the end for the whole cult of measurement, statistics, targets and indicators that has become such a feature of modern life, not just in the Blair government, but around the world?'
The revolt is against the autistic-like cult of measurement, where everything is given a number. It's not hard to see what's going on with numbers. Companies, economies, schools, people are measured by bunches of numbers. Numbers are easy: did the company make money, did the student memorize the answers? But they ignore a lot of things, too. Did the company rape the environment, does the student have imagination?
It is a dream from the world of management consultancy, encapsulated in the McKinsey slogan that "everything can be measured and what gets measured gets managed".
The problem is that people are now expected to do what the targets tell them, rather than what is actually necessary. Hospitals are ordering more expensive trolleys and reclassifying them as "mobile beds", to sidestep the target that no patient should stay on a hospital trolley for more than four hours. I also know of at least one local authority that achieves government targets for separating waste - at great expense - but then simply mixes it all up again in landfill. Scotland Yard figures that showed it had recruited 218 people from ethnic minorities between April and September 2000 turned out to include Irish, New Zealanders and Australians. The useful figure was four.
The consequences of pinning down the wrong thing are severe. All your resources will be focused on achieving something you did not intend, as the Pentagon discovered in the Vietnam war, when it audited the success of military units by their body counts. Result: terrible loss of life among the Vietnamese, but no US victory.
(From The Progressive Review.)
9:41:18 AM 
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