The Tyranny of Metrics

How the obsession with quantifying human efficiency threatens our colleges, medical care, companies, and authorities

In the present day, organizations of every kind are dominated by the assumption that the trail to success is quantifying human efficiency, publicizing the outcomes, and dividing up the rewards primarily based on the numbers. However in our zeal to instill the analysis course of with scientific rigor, we have gone from measuring efficiency to fixating on measuring itself. The result’s a tyranny of metrics that threatens the standard of our lives and most vital establishments. On this well timed and highly effective guide, Jerry Muller uncovers the harm our obsession with metrics is inflicting―and reveals how we are able to start to repair the issue.

Crammed with examples from training, drugs, enterprise and finance, authorities, the police and army, and philanthropy and international assist, this transient and accessible guide explains why the seemingly irresistible stress to quantify efficiency distorts and distracts, whether or not by encouraging “gaming the stats” or “instructing to the check.” That is as a result of what can and does get measured just isn’t all the time price measuring, might not be what we actually wish to know, and will draw effort away from the issues we care about. Alongside the way in which, we be taught why paying for measured efficiency does not work, why surgical scorecards might enhance deaths, and far more. However metrics may be good when used as a complement to―quite than a alternative for―judgment primarily based on private expertise, and Muller additionally offers examples of when metrics have been helpful.

Full with a guidelines of when and tips on how to use metrics, The Tyranny of Metrics is a vital corrective to a hardly ever questioned pattern that more and more impacts us all.