Among my holiday reads has been Jerry Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics, published in the UK in a couple of weeks (can be pre-ordered now). The broad thesis of the book, which is a lively read, will be familiar to readers of the literature on the gaming of public service targets. This short book is stuffed with examples of the counter-productive results of insistence on numerical targets.

There is an interesting chapter on the origins of metric-fixation (at least in capitalist economies – the Soviet Union was always rather keen on it), which starts: “The demand for measured accountability and transparency waxes as trust wanes.” Social change following the explosion of protest against authority in the 1960s and the erosion of the post-war class certainties contributed to this process. So did the evident failures in public services and nationalised industries by the 1970s. But as the book goes on to note – and has been explored in the academic literature – public services are not like businesses, having a larger, complex set of aims and depending fundamentally on intrinsic motivation. A thriving public sector is important to the health of the wider economy: “A capitalist society depends for its flourishing on a variety of institutions that provide a counterweight to the market with its focus on monetary gain.”

The book goes on to give a range of examples of targets turned counter-productive in arenas from higher education to medicine and policing to business. Yes, business too. For here targets are linked to remuneration. Yet, as the book notes, economic theory (Holmstrom and Milgrom, as I describe here) and evidence point firmly away from rewarding the attainment of targets whenever individual effort is un-monitorable. Not that this has prevented to spread of performance pay or bonuses, Muller observes: “Although there is a large body of scholarship in the fields of psychology and economics that call into question the premises and effectiveness of pay for measured performance, that literature seems to have done little to halt the spread of metric fixation.” The book ends with a section describing how to use targets intelligently – think about what you’re trying to measure, why and for what purpose. Above all, think. The frustration is that it offers no thoughts about how to roll back the vast swathes of counter-prouctive targetry already afflicting us. Just imagine the outcry if any politician promises a ‘bonfire of the targets’ or less transparency. On the contrary, the arms race seems as intense as ever – when the pitfalls of one type of target are recognized, the solution is more complicated metrics. But dearmament is what we need.[amazon_link asins=’0691174954′ template=’ProductAd’ store=’enlighteconom-21′ marketplace=’UK’ link_id=’77f90151-ea50-11e7-b438-4348033ba2bc’]