Against Metricocracy

Anand Giridharadas of the NYT had a great piece the other day that comes up with as good a label for our historic era as I’ve seen: We are children of the Age of Metrics.

Welcome to the Age of Metrics — or to the End of Instinct. Metrics are everywhere. It is increasingly with them that we decide what to read, what stocks to buy, which poor people to feed, which athletes to recruit, which films and restaurants to try. World Metrics Day was declared for the first time this year.

The once-mysterious formation of tastes is becoming a quantitative science, as services like Netflix and Pandora and StumbleUpon deploy algorithms to predict, and shape, what we like to watch, listen to and read.

These services are wondrous. They also risk lumping us into clusters of the like-minded and depriving us of the self-fortifying act of choosing. What will it mean to prefer one genre of song when you have never confronted others? It is one thing to love your country because you have seen the world and love it still; it is quite another to love it because you know nothing else.

Giridharadas goes on to question whether the overreliance on metrics winds up hurting our ability to reason in other ways–or even articulate other sorts of wisdom. So, it turns out, do the folks behind a new study commissioned by the French government looking at how policymaking decisions about things like foreign-aid spending are made.

But the commission’s solution was revealing of our times: not more balance between qualitative and quantitative, but more metrics: new statistics on human well-being and economic sustainability to contend with data on production.

The commission’s chairman, Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate in economics and the author of a forthcoming book, “Freefall,” on the Great Recession, has been a critic of the world’s saturation by business logic. I asked him what he made of metricocracy. He said metrics were valuable tools but were in danger of squelching other ways of perceiving. But he argued that his commission had no choice but to speak in metricese.

The same battle has been raging in less highfalutin realms, too. Like baseball. Michael Lewis’ classic Moneyball represented an ode to the metricians, making a hero of the Oakland A’s GM who managed to exploit various player resources that had been undervalued by traditional baseball wisdom. And, sure enough, Buzz Bissinger’s Three Nights in August soon offered a riposte, praising the gut-calls of a veteran manager.

Currents – Are Metrics Blinding Our Perception? – NYTimes.com.