The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Ayn Rand Lives

This is an important book about an important subject. It’s primary importance lies in the fact that it is completely wrong about what’s at issue and how to fix it. It is so wrong that it makes the case for its antithesis. This too is wrong, if only slightly less 0bviously so.

Here’s the thesis: “We live in the age of measured accountability, of reward for measured performance, and belief in the virtues of publicizing those metrics through ‘transparency.’ But the identification of accountability with metrics and with transparency is deceptive. Accountability ought to mean being held responsible for one’s actions. But by a sort of linguistic sleight of hand, accountability has come to mean demonstrating success through standardized measurement,... The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.”

Here’s the problem: what Muller means by standardized metrics is what some group of people - managers, politicians, scientists - have agreed among themselves as to what constitutes ‘success’. The entire book is then devoted to examples of how this sort of agreement results in stupid actions and consequences. My experience, like his, is that many metrics are misconceived, obsolete, counter-productive, and well... stupid. But rather than investigate how to improve the way these metrics are arrived at by any group, Muller plumps for replacing them with a vague concept of ‘individual experience.’ But what is the content of this individual experience? It can only be another more or less (usually less) articulate metric, some different criterion of correct choice, or it’s nothing but fantasy. And if this criterion has not been accepted by the group as superior to the existing ‘standardized’ criterion, how has ‘accountability’ been served?

An answer might be that the decision on the criterion used by an individual in defiance of the established metric is the precise action for which he or she is to be held accountable. Is the metric of individual experience better than the established metric? This would be quite reasonable - disobeying orders for a good reason should be acceptable when the orders are obviously destructive, illegal, or have unexpected collateral effects. But this answer would require some elaboration about the process by which an individual’s experience, when in conflict with established criteria of decision, can be reconciled with, incorporated into, or modify the established view of correct action. A military courts-martial for example is usually not convened to determine whether insubordination has taken place but whether it is justified in the circumstances.

But Muller doesn’t provide the least hint how the experience of an individual, or new experiences at all, should be used to modify the ‘standing orders’ of established metrics. He seems to believe that there are real but inherently inarticulate criteria living in the nervous systems of decision-makers which, if forced into some level of operational literacy, would lose their real import. He also believes that in general terms these inarticulate instincts are superior to any metric formulated by a group. If the individual is in conflict with the group, the group is simply wrong. Whatever else he has to say about accountability is therefore nonsense. There is none. Disagreement about ‘what counts’ is down to some sort of genetically-instilled spiritual preferences (or perhaps hedonistic utility) that can’t be questioned lest it inhibit the exercise of individual sovereignty.

I understand Muller’s frustration with the idiotic metrics which are employed in business and social policy. I have my own thesaurus of war stories about how such metrics have destroyed organisations and damaged individuals. And Muller is fighting against a real intellectual enemy - the idea that measurement of anything is an activity devoid of political judgment. This ideology, and it is just that, is the antithesis to Muller’s thesis. It seeks to establish that what we measure, principally in our choice of a metric of success, as some objective property of the thing measured. This is the foundation stone of scientism which the belief that individuals must submit to the rationality of reality, a reality determined by a consensus of experts. These experts may include a diverse set of skills - accountancy, economics, sociology, management or finance for example - but their aim is the same: to impose a standard, universal metric of success wherever they ply their influence. And Muller is right to resist this sort of intellectual totalitarianism.

But he is not right to substitute the arbitrariness of some group of experts with the arbitrariness of some individual’s experience. This is just another ideology. It strikes me that Muller takes the ideas of economic neo-liberalism to their philosophical outer limits. Margret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan didn’t believe that society existed; only individuals interacting did. Muller extends this to the realm of practical ideas from moral calculus to commercial decision-making. Discussion, mutual discovery, agreement and group learning are not things he can even consider in his ideological cage. How conflicts about what is important and therefore what should be measured in business, politics, and any cooperative effort are simply not his concern. What he calls ‘metric fixation’ is no different from ‘social awareness’. I am quite sure that Ayn Rand is alive and well in Muller’s garden shed.

Postscript: Muller implicitly presumes that social groups are fictional and should be given no status within his ideology of measurement. The opposing ideology, that only social conventions have meaning in measurement, is also prevalent. See here for a typical example: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show.... There are interesting philosophical implications of both views. For example ‘measurement socialists’ believe that the measurements they make are objective properties of the thing measured. While ‘measurement individualists’ like Muller believe that what is measured is entirely in the head of the one doing the measuring. Debates between the two groups are rarely edifying. For an alternative theory which avoids both the Scylla of collectivism and the Charybdis of individualism in measurement, see here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

View all my reviews