The Metric Society

We've become obsessed with measuring, quantifying, and rating just about everything

Might Lenin be the grandfather of “popular statistics”? The British government’s missions and milestones are oddly reminiscent of a Soviet publicity drive. (Image: Wikimedia commons)

There is no scheme that better captures the outlook of Britain’s current rulers than a “digital dashboard” for tracking policy goals. Proposed last autumn, this online platform would allow members of the public to measure their government’s performance. Rarely are the assumptions of modern technocratic politics so perfectly distilled: governance is about delivering and communicating a sense of progress; citizens need to feel “engaged” even if they are not involved; anything can be improved with an app. But how, you may ask, are we supposed to measure this progress objectively? With numbers, of course. During its first year in power, the Labour government introduced a raft of official “missions” and “milestones” covering everything from childhood development to house building to the proportion of renewable energy in the grid. Many are numerical targets.

One has to wonder how the designers of this strategy imagined it playing out. Perhaps people would pause a few times a day to open their Mission Tracker app, swelling with patriotic pride as they surveyed the latest figures on hospital waiting lists or teacher recruitment? Perhaps they would read it out to their friends at the pub? As I’ve heard others commenting, there is an odd but unmistakable echo of Soviet Communism or Maoism in all of this. It was Lenin, after all, who argued that statistics should not just be “a matter for ‘government servants,’ or for narrow specialists,” and impelled his comrades to “carry statistics to the people and make them popular… so that the comparison of the business results of the various communes may become a matter of general interest and study.” Alas, there is still no way to measure the failure of the government’s “digital dashboard” itself, as the idea appears to have been quietly shelved.

The fixation with quantifiable measurement, and the role of statistics in politics more broadly, was the subject of my latest UnHerd column. My argument, in summary:

Bereft of imagination in a rapidly changing world, our political class clings ever more tightly to numerical targets and indicators, hoping to convey an impression of competence and stability. Instead, they have only reinforced the sense that we are ruled by management consultants rather than leaders. Nor have metrics provided the bulwark against chaos that they promised; for the numbers, it turns out, do not always show what people think they show.

An over-reliance on statistical models and measurements comes with two great dangers. The first is that the seemingly objective quality of numbers can seduce us into believing that they present an infallible picture of reality. In fact, data are gathered and modelled by institutions with all the shortcomings and flaws that one would expect of a human undertaking. The second problem is that our behaviour is increasingly determined by what we can measure — or think we can measure — rather than what is actually important or desirable.

Ironically, British politics has become increasingly preoccupied with numbers at a time when those numbers have, in fact, become less reliable, due to on-going problems at the Office for National Statistics.

But these tendencies are not confined to the realm of politics, as Steffen Mau observes in his 2017 book The Metric Society. Contemporary society is obsessed with measuring, quantifying, and rating just about everything it can. We assess our social standing through the number of followers or views we’ve amassed. We use devices to count our steps, track our heart rate and measure our sleep cycles. We choose products, restaurants and holiday destinations based on average customer ratings. Academics are judged by their “impact factor”, and universities by their rankings in league tables, while house prices rise and fall in tandem with the Ofsted ratings of the local schools. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has even suggested that citizens could give their local police officers individual scores. Consumer capitalism has done more to “carry statistics to the people” than Lenin could have dreamed for his socialist state.

All the while, of course, we too are being measured. Credit and insurance policies are part of ordinary life as never before, and rely on scoring our ability to generate income and remain healthy. Many employees seem to be evaluated more often than schoolchildren. Tech platforms and their marketing “partners” are measuring our every movement and keystroke, producing the data streams which have become the vital resource of the age.

There is no point denying the usefulness of measurement. For all their limitations, statistics are an essential tool for studying and understanding the modern world, a tool that journalists are often too ignorant of. Customer ratings and other forms of collective assessment can likewise bring clarity, convenience, and protection against frauds, while self-measurement can offer a degree of control over one’s life that many people need. But metrics pose a similar danger to culture and to our personal lives as they do to our politics. As Mau puts it, “if everything we do and every step we take in life are tracked, registered and fed into evaluation systems, then we lose the freedom to act independently of the behavioural and performance expectations embodied in those systems.” In other words, our decisions will be shaped by what can be measured, and what we choose to measure, at the expense of other considerations.

I worry that the metric society is one in which people never take risks, and never dare to be honest or original, because there are easier ways to avoid negative assessments and maintain a high score. And I worry that, in the metric society, we are less able to explore or to develop our spirit, because we only encounter what the measuring apparatus has concluded we already want.