The Tyranny of the Measurable

How metrics can mess us up

House prices, sales figures, monthly salaries, social media likes… what do they have in common? These are numbers that govern our lives, and I contend that we have grown obsessed with them because they are easy to measure and track.

Surrounded by the measurable, everything becomes a contest.

The scariest thing about the modern world is how we translated our most deeply human and precious ideals into metrics bulls-eyes to hit:

• Academic prestige — school rank
• Attention — page views
• Attraction — Tinder matches
• Admiration — Instagram likes
• Diligence — GPA
• Intelligence — test scores
• Success — net worth

In the process, we get to miss the forest for the trees, and sometimes even throw the baby out with the bathwater. We turn more procrustean and start seeing like a state.

This fixation appeals to the natural competitor in each of us. We all crave to compete, but we thirst for some semblance of a goalpost or finish line. We just have to keep uncovering where we are in the social hierarchy — who are inferior or superior — because in large social circles this has always been the most efficient way to guide human actions.

We need to know our place, so we find ways to compete to find out.

Numbers enable this competition. So we chase those numbers! But we quickly slide onto a slippery slope and let those numbers define our self-worth. That is the game we choose to play, and we are the players. If we’re doing well, great, aim higher. If not, we tumble and stumble.

We become slaves to these numbers because we don’t know any better. Most people simply outsource their judging and evaluation function to these numbers, because the alternative of deep thinking and feeling is way more taxing for the brain. The number becomes a crutch we rely on.

Freedom is way harder to measure than net worth, so we just chase a dollar value net worth. Somebody feels off, but he went to a top-ranked school, so we give him the benefit of the doubt. Deep relationships are way harder to measure than likes, so we just chase the likes. We conflate the numbers with aspirational values, placing the cart before the horse.

This is where transparency becomes a scourge. In the mimetic milieu of human communities, it benefits the majority to make these hierarchies modestly vague. If we make the numbers too clear, the mimetic rivalries inflame and erupt. When one person gets 10x more likes than another, it’s clear that she’s higher up in the hierarchy than he is in that platform. This over-transparency is why social media has become such a cesspool, and why platforms like Instagram are taking steps to hide like counts.

To make something measurable is to cheapen it. You transmute an aspirational value from a Platonic form to a prosaic commercial entity. And to impose only the measurable is to destroy it.

The book Seeing like a State gives plenty examples of this, one example where 19th century foresters planted only one crop type because it is the most productive and measurable, giving them a boost in the first few years until pests eventually ate up the plantation because the ecological balance got disrupted, and another example when the Great Leap Forward instituted such grand goals in one area of the economy (agriculture) while neglecting everything else, because the targets became blinders, and the bureaucrats became metric-driven to a fault.

Numbers often make us think short-term and lose sight of the long-term, falling into the classic management trap. ‘What gets measured gets managed,’ so Drucker says, hence managers often fixate on concrete goals like profit and costs at the expense of the seemingly fluffy but more fundamentally important success drivers like culture and customer happiness.

In the NBA, executives like Daryl Morey espoused analytics as the answer that will bring championships, but where are the 76ers now? You can run all the numbers right, hit all those targets, and win the battles but still lose the war (or the championship), because success requires the important yet hard-to-measure ingredients like team chemistry. By just focusing on the numbers, you may be optimizing only for a partial or intermediary goalpost. You get a false sense of rigor and precision.

On the macro economy, we are going through another round of this by obsessing too much on GDP and GDP growth instead of a more authentic, encompassing measure that covers progress in human well-being.

Well, you may argue, but what choice do we have?

It is hard not to work towards maximum efficiency but we should again look at the big picture. Robustness and sustainability are becoming more prized in an increasingly chaotic and resource-constrained world. This means that our thinking has to shift from business optimization terms towards more ecological systems terms — balancing multiple variables, diverse stakeholders, stocks and flows, as well as prioritizing empathetic immersion over surface-level connection.

Numbers are useful to the extent that it provides shared standards that serve as the bedrock for civilization, but they are meant to be proxies or approximations for the ‘real things.’ There are no shortcuts to deep thinking, feeling, and connecting. Butchering a Little Prince quote here, the essential only becomes visible to the eye when we stop fixating on the numbers and start training our minds on the authentic and the true.