by David Boyle
Schumacher published this ground-breaking book just four years before he died. It owed part of its immediate popularity to the title, coined by his publisher Anthony Blond, which passed into the language – rather to Schumacher’s regret, because he felt it didn’t do justice to the message. His claim that the Sermon on the Mount was an instruction manual for economic reform won him enthusiasts all over the world, but enraged many economists and industrialists. When he visited the USA to advise President Carter just before he died, some of his bitterest critics celebrated his visit with death threats.
This extreme reaction was partly because of what his book meant for old-style economics. Measuring everything by price wasn’t just self-deception, he said – it was destroying civilization. It did so by concentrating on differences in quantity while suppressing differences in quality. The danger for us all, so wrapped up by numbers a quarter of a century later, is that Schumacher’s analysis doesn’t just apply to economics. Most areas of life are going the same way. If numbers are not measuring prices, they are measuring something else. And every time they do so, the qualitative aspects of what they are measuring – the least measurable and most valuable – get driven out.
Take education. I was leafing through the autobiography of an old admiral recently and came across a passage that seemed particularly dated. It was only half a century ago, and yet there he was lavishing praise on the headmaster of his son’s school because ‘his main aim was to develop their character, while ensuring adequate school education’.
Ah yes, those were the days! Nothing about ‘excellence’, league tables or exams; education was about character, which he went on to define as ‘self-confidence and high principles’. Character and just enough education to get by. It’s not the kind of phrase a modern educationalist would be seen dead using – probably quite rightly – yet most sane people agree there is much more to education than classrooms, skills and exam results. It’s just that they don’t tend to get measured, so they get ignored, then they get forgotten by the people who take decisions and those that write about them.
This failure of numbers means we get increasingly blind. Things that can’t be measured – love, creativity, awe, religion, altruism – get forgotten by professionals and sometimes get ridiculed too. We are now in a world that is designed to be measured, that praises and promotes people with hard measuring skills, and downgrades those with human imaginative ones. This is one area of life where the feminist revolution has not even sparked. We are increasingly silenced by the number-crunchers – unable to make up our minds or take control of the future in the increasing cacophony of measurements and statistics.
Reading Admiral Lord Chatfield’s comments on his son’s education made me realize it’s impossible to apply modern educational measurements even a generation back. You just can’t compare the two with numbers – though, I have to admit, even the admiral and his colleagues tried to measure the success of his kind of education. They did it by sports results, and we all know from watching modern football that this is not a very good way of measuring character.
This is no new problem, yet somehow the measurement of education is where the whole issue is at its sharpest. We have created an equivalent to Jeremy Bentham’s fearsome Panopticon for our schoolkids, measured and monitored ever more closely – both for their performance and for the standard of care they are given. Trust is old-fashioned. We don’t need it any more now we can measure. Now the government is extending their target-setting and measuring to nursery classes and play groups and urging children to take GCSEs as young as eleven. It’s muddling up exams with education, said lecturer Bethan Marshall – a classic case of muddling up the measurements with what you want to measure. ‘I want my children and the countless thousands like them to be educated, not simply schooled,’ she wrote.
What is it about education that makes it such a special target for the number-crunchers? Because it’s just as bad in higher education as it is in primary. The Research Assessment Exercise was introduced in 1986 as a method of measuring the performance of universities. It is now the main way that students, businesses and government funders judge their success – yet it simply measures the number of articles their staff have managed to get published in academic journals. The result? Narrower and narrower research, important articles cut into three, conventional research rather than bold, dangerous new thinking and what historian David Cannadine called ‘a large and depressed professoriate … with all the frenzied energy of a battery chickens on overtime, laying for their lives.’ The Research Assessment Exercise is a wonderful example of what happens when you measure the wrong thing.
There has probably never been a moment in history that measures as much as we do. Our politicians pack their speeches full of skewed statistics. Civil servants and businesses spawn targets with every report. Screeds of data collect on computer on our buying habits, blood counts, accident rates, bank balances – and none of it quite gets to the crux of the matter. There are already six times as many people employed in accountancy and financial services as there were in the early 1950s, and that’s just a small part of the new auditing and number-crunching industry. The government has set itself 8,000 new targets at the last count. So many people will soon be employed monitoring that there will be nobody left to do the actual work.
We laugh at Dickens’ ridiculous character of Thomas Gradgrind and his obsession with facts and nothing but facts. Yet here we are surrounded by them.
And look what’s coming next. Psychiatrists are increasingly relying on a fearsome numerical system of diagnosis called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, which can have a disastrous effect on your career if you end up under one of their ‘disorder’ labels – as almost any of us would. There have even been moves to force doctors to diagnose according to programmable criteria on the grounds that it would be more ‘open and scientific’. A similar number-based computer programme is being used to write individual reports in schools. Another one is now used by the Inland Revenue to spot fraudulent tax returns. The result: the amount of money recovered dropped by half since the days when inspectors did the same job by their own judgement.
American companies are now doing such close analysis of the attitudes of their customers by brand that they were able to know that those most in favour of the impeachment of Bill Clinton were consumers of Campbell’s Soup (84 per cent), followed by Oscar Mayer hot dogs, Fantastik cleaner and Tide detergent. Burger King customers, for some reason, were the most pro-Clinton. They are also using a special software to help them take decisions called AHP or Analytic Hierarchy Process. It assigns ‘intensity’ numbers to different options and was inspired by the way the inventor’s grandma worked out difficult problems. It’s now used by the US army and air force – even by the Egyptian government to work out tough foreign policy issues. But after all that, inventor Tom Saaty doesn’t ‘recommend using AHP to decide which restaurant to go to,’ he told Fortune magazine. ‘It would spoil my pleasure.’ A clue there, perhaps.
A number of British companies are working on the idea of microchip implants for their workforce to measure their timekeeping. Others are pioneering ways of measuring emotional intelligence, or – like one Virginia company – colourcoding staff badges according to a numerical approximation of their personality type. Worse, BT’s Soul Catcher project aims to find a way of digitizing every sense and experience in a lifetime so that it can all be held on floppy disk.
Then there are the measuring machines. Panasonic has developed a ‘smart’ fridge that measures what you eat and orders more milk when you need it. Matsushita has developed a ‘smart’ toilet that measures your weight, fat-ratio, temperature, protein and glucose levels every time you give it something to work on. Their VitalSigns medical kit then sends this data automatically to your local clinic – probably the last thing they want.
It’s hard to object to any of these measurements by themselves, but taken together they represent a massive loss of faith
in our own judgement, intuition and our trust in other people.
Measurement as obsessively practised by our society is about standardization and control. It is the by-product of empire, but not the kind of empires we were used to historically. This is our empire. The measurements are a reflection of what we believe and what we fear the most. We collect them because we no longer trust politicians, professionals and natural processes. We insist that their ways, methods and progress are measured every step of the way.
‘The more strictly we are watched, the better we behave,’ said Bentham. Although his Panopticon was never built – the prison where every cell can be watched by a single guard – his calculating has created a world like it, and we live in it.
II
In 1989, the new chairman of chemical giant DuPont Ed Woolard gave two speeches which – without consulting his staff – promised his company would cut poisonous emissions by 65 per cent, carcinogens by 90 per cent and hazardous waste by 35 per cent. DuPont was then the biggest polluter in the USA. ‘Well, I’ve done it,’ he told the company afterwards. ‘Now you guys have to do it – it’s your job.’ It was a difficult moment, and there were some in the company who thought he had lost his marbles completely. But when he stood down eight years later, the targets had been all but met. It was a prime example of the power of setting numerical targets and measuring them.
Let’s be clear about this. Counting things is a vital human skill. Using numbers can help predict who gets cancer, can show up problems in social or engineering systems and above all – (as Chadwick found) they can shock people into action. They can let us orientate ourselves in our world and – to some extent – begin to compare like with like. They allow us to take the world unawares. All the bizarre measurements scattered through this book fall into that category. They may not be precisely right, but they let us see the world differently for a moment. They are a tool for visualizing problems. Nobody is suggesting that we should stop measuring altogether.
There are also times when we simply have to try measuring the unmeasurable – that is the nature of the counting crisis in education, business and politics. The danger comes when we do nothing but measure, or when we really believe the numbers are measuring something real. Then we will eventually turn round and look at our league-tabled education system and wonder why it’s turning out narrow-minded, miserable children who are only good at tests and exams.
The hopeless dream of number-crunchers is still to reach the perfect objective non-political decision, to take all that human prejudice and error out of politics or management. It is a dream from the foundation of the London Statistical Society whose first rule of conduct was ‘to exclude all opinions’. It goes right back to the pioneering French statisticians who believed that counting things could abolish politics altogether and usher in a reign of facts. It wasn’t true then, and it isn’t true now – even if we wanted it to be. Life is just not certain enough.
We can see where it goes wrong all around us. The more politicians urge us to look at the scientific evidence, the more their numbers seem to contradict each other. Red meat has a statistically proven link to bowel cancer in the USA but not in the UK. Tea is statistically proven to be good for you and bad for you – the same with margarine, wine, Q-tips, jogging, breast implants and practically everything on the market. Our overmeasured world has become the victim of some social version of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle – that the observer in a scientific experiment affects the result.
By poring over the measurements, we have also convinced ourselves we live in a period of rapid change. We must be because the numbers change all the time. Yet if we step back from them a moment we find that the really important things do not change. Death from disease or highway robbery may be nightmares of the past, but ill-health and crime – as far as we can tell – are with us still. There are no workhouses any more, yet the proportion of the poor and the proportion of national income we spend on eradicating it are comparable with what they were before workhouses were invented. The measurements have blinded us to our greatest failures, just as they have to so much else.
And one of those aspects of life they blind us to is the paradoxical way the world changes. We measure our way to success – money or whatever else we had decided we needed to be happy – only to find that wasn’t it at all. Even political success tends to work in the ways we least expect. Change doesn’t happen like that: ‘Men fight and lose the battle,’ wrote William Morris in A Dream of John Ball, ‘and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes it turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.’ You can’t measure real progress with figures.
Right back in the 1830s, the philosopher Georg Friedrich Pohl used the metaphor of understanding a journey through beautiful landscape and fascinating people by using a train timetable. The figures were accurate enough, but it left out most of the experience. Now we are all a little like Jedediah Buxton, the eighteenth-century prodigy who tried to understand Shakespeare by counting his words. Buxton probably suffered from autism, and so – in a sense – do we. Not as individuals, but as a society. Like autistic children, we are slow to smile, unresponsive, passive and we avoid eye contact. We find it hard to understand other people’s emotional expressions.
It’s not surprising that our institutions are being built in this image too. We will soon have a workforce recruited by categorizing aspects of their personalities on a scale of one to ten. We will have our nannies graded for their caring abilities on the basis of some kind of checklist. We will have children who can pass exams but have no judgement. We will measure all our institutions by numerical ‘best practice’ standards and wonder vaguely why nobody innovates any more. And we will have doctors who translate our symptoms into numbers before feeding them into the computer. We will be turning ourselves ever so slowly into machines.
III
‘Tralfamadorians, of course, say that every creature and plant in the universe is a machine,’ wrote Kurt Vonnegut in one of his science fiction epics. ‘It amuses them that so many Earthlings are offended by the idea of being machines.’ Number-crunchers and technocrats are Tralfamadorians, amused that people still resist the idea of being machines or computers – the sum of their parts. The question of whether they’re right goes to the heart of the argument about what being human means.
‘The human being is the only computer produced by amateurs,’ said one General Electric executive, a little scarily, echoing the behaviourist B. F. Skinner. As far back as 1962, another executive, this time from Motorola, wrote the following:
At birth the infant will be clamped in front of the TV eye by means of a suitable supporting structure, and two sections of tubing will be connected to provide nourishment and to carry away the waste materials. From this time on, the subject will live an ideal vicarious life, scientifically selected for compatibility with the fixed influences of the inherited genes and chromosomes.
This seemed to him a recipe for ‘race suicide’, but it could so easily have been serious. We have spent the past forty years shaking off these kind of predictions. I can remember when space technologists were predicting that all food would soon come in easy bite-size tablets and tubes – just like in the Apollo capsules. But the futurists had never heard of Elizabeth David. There is a constant human longing for what is ‘real’ which seems to go beyond the merely calculated. Hence the unexpected survival of live performance, adventure holidays and organic food.
The current front line is over genetics. Can every human characteristic be measured to a specific gene, each with a specific code number, so that every human being could be completely reproducible? Can every human characteristic, good and bad, be numbered according to genes and their combinations? When we can do nothing but count and measure, it sometimes seems that way, especially with highly-educated Tralfamadorians telling us so on the radio and TV every day. The belief that we are more than the sum
of our parts is primarily a matter of faith, but the counting crisis is, in this sense, rather a hopeful sign. It means that businesspeople are rejecting the idea that companies are the sum of their measurable parts – worth just what they would be if they were chopped up and sold off. That’s why they are struggling to find ways of measuring the intangible core. That’s why the boundaries of measuring intangibles are being pushed forward – because individual human beings are more than their constituent chemicals, and that individuality needs measuring too.
It’s a hopeful sign and a frightening one at the same time. The problem is not so much trying to measure – sometimes you have to try, as we’ve seen. The danger is when people or institutions think they have succeeded. That’s when the damage is done and when the spirit dies. Every ‘bottom line’, firmly held, is a generalization that fails to do justice to the individual moment or the individual person, or patient, business or child. Yardsticks are a vital human tool, as long as we remember how limiting they are if we cling to them too closely. The bottom line is the bottom line.
In other words, there are human skills more essential to us than measuring. It’s probably time we accepted that computers and machines will always be able to count and measure better than human beings. They can already guide missiles better and play chess better. It is time we looked at those areas of human nature where computers can’t follow – the world of the non-measurable, non-calculable. Love, intuition, imagination, creativity. There are number-crunchers who say that because they can’t be measured, they do not exist. Yet they continue to survive and provide us with the clues for our continued survival despite that heckling from the wings. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that because they can’t be measured, they can’t be reduced.