Just as the culture of metrics has its boosters on both the political right and left, it also has critics from both sides of the ideological spectrum. From the perspective of the Marxist left, it can be seen, with some justification, as promoting de-skilling, in which changes in the organization of production brought about by those at the top have the effect of devaluing the skills and experience of those subordinate in the system.1 And work that is more circumscribed, and from which discretion has been excised by having to meet narrowly defined goals dictated by others, is more alienating.
THE RATIONALIST ILLUSION
There are also powerful dissections of accountability-as-measurement from conservative and classical liberal thinkers, such as Michael Oakeshott, Michael Polanyi, and Friedrich Hayek, whose analysis has recently been rediscovered by James C. Scott, a Yale anthropologist with self-described anarchist predilections. They have all distinguished between two forms of knowledge, one abstract and formulaic, the other more practical and tacit. Practical or tacit knowledge is the product of experience: it can be learned, but cannot be conveyed in general formulas. Abstract knowledge, by contrast, is a matter of technique, which, it is assumed, can be easily systematized, conveyed, and applied. In Oakeshott’s famous example, there is the sort of abstract, recipe knowledge conveyed by cookbooks; but actually knowing how to make use of such knowledge (“beat an egg,” “whisk the mixture”) requires practical knowledge, based upon experience, that cannot be learned from books. Oakeshott criticized “rationalists” for assuming that the conduct of human affairs is a matter of applying the right formulas or recipes. Technical knowledge is susceptible to precise formulation, which gives it the appearance of certainty. By contrast, he wrote,
[I]t is a characteristic of practical knowledge that it is not susceptible of formulation of this kind. Its normal expression is in a customary or traditional way of doing things, or, simply, in practice. And this gives it the appearance of imprecision and consequently of uncertainty, of being a matter of opinion, of probability rather than truth.
The rationalist believes in the sovereignty of technique in which the only form of authentic knowledge is technical knowledge, for it alone satisfies the standard of certainty that marks real knowledge. The error of rationalism, for Oakeshott, is its failure to appreciate the necessity of practical knowledge and of knowledge of the peculiarity of circumstances.2
SCIENTISM
Friedrich Hayek developed a related critique of what he called “the pretense of knowledge.” Writing in the mid-twentieth century, he chastised socialist attempts at large-scale economic planning for their “scientism,” by which he meant their attempt to engineer economic life, as if planners were in a position to know all the relevant inputs and outputs that make up life in a complex society. The advantage of the competitive market, he maintained, is that it allows individuals not only to make use of their knowledge of local conditions, but to discover new uses for existing resources or imagine new products and services hitherto unknown and unsuspected. In short, planning failed not only to consider relevant but dispersed information, but it also prohibited the entrepreneurial discovery of how to meet particular needs and how to generate new goals.3
Ironically, as a number of contemporary critics have observed, the fixation on quantifiable goals so central to metric fixation—though often implemented by politicians and policymakers who proclaim their devotion to capitalism—replicates many of the intrinsic faults of the Soviet system. Just as Soviet bloc planners set output targets for each factory to produce, so do bureaucrats set measurable performance targets for schools, hospitals, police forces, and corporations. And just as Soviet managers responded by producing shoddy goods that met the numerical targets set by their overlords, so do schools, police forces, and businesses find ways of fulfilling quotas with shoddy goods of their own: by graduating pupils with minimal skills, or downgrading grand theft to misdemeanor-level petty larceny, or opening dummy accounts for bank clients.4
A good deal of Hayek’s critique of scientism (which he also applied to much of modern economics) also pertains to the ideology of metrics. By setting out in advance a limited and purportedly measurable set of goals, metric fixation truncates the range of actual goals of a business or organization. It also precludes entrepreneurship within organizations, as there may be new goals and purposes worth pursuing that are not part of the metric.
One could draw together the insights of a number of thinkers into this dictum: The calculative is the enemy of the imaginative. Entrepreneurship, as we have noted, depends on taking what the economist Frank Knight termed “unmeasureable risk,” for the potential benefits of an innovation are not subject to precise calculation. Or in the formulation of Alfie Kohn, a long-time critic of pay-for-performance, metrics “inhibits risk-taking, an inevitable concomitant of exploration and creativity. We are less likely to take chances, to play with possibilities, and to follow hunches, which may, after all, not pay off.”5
A hallmark of practical, local knowledge, as James Scott has noted, is that “it is as economical and accurate as it needs to be, no more and no less, for addressing the problem at hand.”6 By contrast, the degree of numerical precision promised by metrics may be far greater than is required by actual practitioners, and attaining that precision requires an expenditure of time and effort that may not be worthwhile. The quest for precision may therefore be wasteful, and resented for that reason by those required to sacrifice their time and ingenuity.
“To demand or preach mechanical precision, even in principle, in a field incapable of it is to be blind and to mislead others,” as the British liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in an essay on political judgment. Indeed what Berlin says of political judgment applies more broadly: judgment is a sort of skill at grasping the unique particularities of a situation, and it entails a talent for synthesis rather than analysis, “a capacity for taking in the total pattern of a human situation, of the way in which things hang together.”7 A feel for the whole and a sense for the unique are precisely what numerical metrics cannot supply.
KEDOURIE’S CRITIQUE OF THATCHER
In 1987 the Conservative government of Margaret Thatcher developed wide-ranging plans for transforming the public funding of higher education. The plan called for a plethora of new “performance indicators,” on the evidence of which ministers and their bureaucracies were to decide upon the allocation of funds to particular universities. The distinguished British conservative historian and political theorist Elie Kedourie emerged as one of the plan’s most scathing critics. “After two decades of government-sponsored excess and prodigality,” he wrote, “we see now abroad a vague but powerful discontent and impatience with the ways of universities … a nameless yearning for some formula or recipe—more science perhaps, more information technology, more questionnaires, more monitoring—which will scientifically (or better, magically) prove that they are not wasting their time, which will hook them up with the humming conveyor-belts of industry.”8 He wondered in astonishment that “a Conservative administration should have embarked on a university policy so much at variance with its proclaimed ideals and objectives,” and concluded that “[i]n order to explain the inexplicable, one is driven to conclude that the policy is an outcome not of conscious decisions, but of an unconscious automatic response to an irresistible spirit of the times.”9 Under the slogan of “efficiency” a great fraud was being perpetrated, Kedourie declared, for “efficiency is not a general and abstract attribute. It is always relative to the object in view. A business is more efficient when its return on the factors employed in production is greater than that of another, comparable one. But a university is not a business.”10 Under the pretense that it was a business, and that the government represented its customers, Kedourie observed that it was the Minister of Education who would decide, on the basis of spurious criteria, what constituted educational value.11
THE ONWARD MARCH OF ACCOUNTABILITY
In the decade that followed, “accountability” and “performance measurement” became buzzwords among business leaders, politicians, and policymakers in the United States as well. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed the Government Performance and Results Act, which required all agencies to develop mission statements, long-range strategic plans, and annual performance goals, together with descriptions of the measures to be used to gauge progress toward those goals. Initiated by Republican legislators and signed by a Democratic president, the act enjoyed bipartisan support.12 In 2004, during the presidency of George W. Bush, the federal government’s venerable General Accounting Office was rechristened the Government Accountability Office.
With that we enter our own age, and move from the history and theory of measured performance to its contemporary practice.