Jerry Z. Muller
The Tyranny of Metrics
We increasingly live in a culture of metric fixation: the belief of so many organizations that scientific management means replacing judgment based upon experience and talent with standardized measures of performance, and then rewarding or punishing individuals and organizations based upon those measures. The buzzwords of metric fixation are all around us: “metrics,” “accountability,” “assessment,” and “transparency.”
The Tyranny of Metrics treats metric fixation as the organizational equivalent of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Though often characterized as “best practice,” metric fixation is in fact often counterproductive, with costs to individual satisfaction with work, organizational effectiveness, and economic growth. The book helps explain why metric fixation has become so popular, why it is so often counterproductive, and why some people have an interest in promoting it. It is a book that analyzes and critiques a dominant fashion in contemporary organizational culture, with an eye to making life in organizations more satisfying and productive. It’s a book about management broadly construed. But unlike most authors who write about management, it also tries to see organizations from the perspective of the managed.
Editor: Judi Pajo
The Tyranny of Metrics
Jerry Z. Muller The Tyranny of Metrics Princeton University Press 240 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches ISBN 9781400889433
Available here →April 16, 2018
20180416-muller-jerry-on-book-tyranny-metrics-1-1-1
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Jerry Z. Muller
Jerry Z. Muller is professor of history and chair of the Department of History at the Catholic University of America in Washington DC. He studied at Brandeis University, Hebrew University, and Columbia University. Besides Capitalism and the Jews and The Tyranny of Metrics, featured in his two Rorotoko interviews, his books include Adam Smith in His Time and Ours (Princeton, 1995) and The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in European Thought (Knopf, 2002). Muller’s essays and articles have appeared in Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, The Times Literary Supplement, and many other publications.
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Metric fixation is predictably counterproductive, because what can be measured is not always what is worth measuring.
Against WM · Underinvestment in higher education, not trade, is why middle-class real earnings have been flat or falling since 1980. On: Quantified performance measurement improves the institutions that adopt it
Against MK · The free-market growth that caused climate change is also what will let households and firms adapt to it. On: Efficiency and optimization are the right design goals for systems that must survive shocks
Against RA · Many undergraduates show no measurable gain in critical thinking because they are not asked to read or write much. On: Quantified performance measurement improves the institutions that adopt it
Against BB · Five of the six main causes of start-up failure are avoidable, so the ninety-percent failure rate is not inevitable. On: Efficiency and optimization are the right design goals for systems that must survive shocks
Alongside KA · The lie detector has survived eighty years of scientific refutation because it was never science. On: Quantified performance measurement improves the institutions that adopt it
Alongside MG · Shooting war is becoming too expensive to wage, so conflict is migrating into law, trade, tourism, migration and crime. On: Efficiency and optimization are the right design goals for systems that must survive shocks
Alongside JW · Guizhou's educational miracle is literally fabricated, with doctored rosters, borrowed students and migrant workers seated as one-day pupils. On: Quantified performance measurement improves the institutions that adopt it
Alongside RD · Ever-greater efficiency is the wrong design goal, and it is what has made modern food, water and supply systems fragile. On: Efficiency and optimization are the right design goals for systems that must survive shocks
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