Living by the numbers
Keeping score in business is easy. Count the till at the end of the day, and of course businesses of any size have monthly, quarterly, and yearly financial statements prepared. Wall Street is a massive industry mostly devoted to number crunching and analyzing. Analysts estimate quarterly earnings for publicly-traded companies. Hits and misses turn into dollars and cents when earnings news is announced.
Never in the past has there been a way to tally the popularity for articles or books. The New York Times best seller list is based more on how certain retail booksellers feel books are moving rather than hard numbers.
Writers who scribble a column for a local paper think everyone in town is reading their work when just a couple of people they don鈥檛 know mention the articles. Receiving a flurry of flattering (or nasty) emails in response to a piece appearing online can fuel a writer鈥檚 notions that the whole world is reading.
But now we know. 鈥淣umbers and rankings are everywhere,鈥� writes Alina Tugend in The New York Times.
In the journalism world, there鈥檚 how many people 鈥渓ike鈥� an article or blog. How many retweeted or e-mailed it? I鈥檒l know, for example, if this column made the 鈥渕ost e-mailed鈥� of the business section. Or of the entire paper. And however briefly, it will matter to me.
罢耻驳别苍诲鈥檚 makes the point that our lives increasing revolve around credit scores, numerical consumer ratings, test scores and the like. But how these numbers are generated is sometimes suspect.
Today鈥檚 younger generation has grown up trusting numbers. 鈥淔or almost anybody in the United States under the age of 25, the only models are quantifiable rankings,鈥� says Howard Gardner a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Forget the intangibles, just give us the figures. Much of this is due to the study of economics going from studying human action to a quantitative exercise with the idea that the economy can be managed and outcomes be predicated. However, as F.A. Hayek explained,
such complex phenomena as the market, which depend on the actions of many individuals, all the circumstances which will determine the outcome of a process 鈥� will hardly ever be fully known or measurable.
Jonah Lehrer on ScienceBlogs that this score keeping creates 鈥渢he tendency of the social software to quantify our social life.鈥� Since the cost of acquiring and maintaining friends is low in social networking, people connect with as many as possible. Do all these 鈥渇riends鈥� provide meaningful feedback, interesting links and information that enhance a person鈥檚 quality of life, or is it merely a game of 鈥淚 have more friends than you鈥�?
Lehrer writes,
What I鈥檓 most troubled by is the desire of individuals (especially myself) to constantly check up on these numbers, and to accept these measurements as a measure of something meaningful. We鈥檝e taken the natural nebulousness of social interactions 鈥� I might know you鈥檙e important, but I don鈥檛 know how important 鈥� and made them explicit. The end result is that our online relationships are shadowed by power relations.
Lehrer wishes there was a social platform that didn鈥檛 measure anything, but doesn鈥檛 think that will happen.
In the same vein, companies doing business for the long haul, not interested in the day-to-day fluctuations of their stock price, dream of a financial world where the quarter-to-quarter results don鈥檛 matter.
In the world of monetary inflation and social denigration, the well-worn phrase 鈥淟ies, damned lies, and statistics鈥� applies more than ever.
Making financial decisions to satisfy their 鈥淔riends鈥� on 鈥淭he Street鈥� to generate the immediate positive feedback of higher stock prices is no way to run an enterprise.
At the same time, being fixated on immediate rankings, traffic and 鈥渓ikes鈥� turns creators into the obsessed.
--------------------------
海角大神 has assembled a diverse group of the best economy-related bloggers out there. Our guest bloggers are not employed or directed by the Monitor and the views expressed are the bloggers' own, as is responsibility for the content of their blogs. To contact us about a blogger, click here. To add or view a comment on a guest blog, please go to the blogger's own site by clicking on the link above.
