2011 IMEKO Conference Papers Published Online

Papers from the Joint International IMEKO TC1+ TC7+ TC13 Symposium held August 31^st to September 2^nd,  2011, in Jena, Germany are now available online at http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24575/IMEKO2011_TOC.pdf. The following will be of particular interest to those interested in measurement applications in the social sciences, education, health care, and psychology:

Nikolaus Bezruczko
Foundational Imperatives for Measurement with Mathematical Models
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24419/ilm1-2011imeko-030.pdf

Nikolaus Bezruczko, Shu-Pi C. Chen, Connie Hill, Joyce M. Chesniak
A Clinical Scale for Measuring Functional Caregiving of Children Assisted with Medical Technologies
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24507/ilm1-2011imeko-032.pdf

Stefan Cano, Anne F. Klassen, Andrea L. Pusic, Andrea
From Breast-Q © to Q-Score ©: Using Rasch Measurement to Better Capture Breast Surgery Outcomes
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24429/ilm1-2011imeko-039.pdf

Gordon A. Cooper, William P. Fisher, Jr.
Continuous Quantity and Unit; Their Centrality to Measurement
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24494/ilm1-2011imeko-019.pdf

William P. Fisher, Jr.
Measurement, Metrology and the Coordination of Sociotechnical Networks
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24491/ilm1-2011imeko-017.pdf

William .P Fisher, Jr., A. Jackson Stenner
A Technology Roadmap for Intangible Assets Metrology
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24493/ilm1-2011imeko-018.pdf

Carl V. Granger, Nikolaus Bezruczko
Body, Mind, and Spirit are Instrumental to Functional Health: A Case Study
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24494/ilm1-2011imeko-019.pdf

Thomas Salzberger
The Quantification of Latent Variables in the Social Sciences: Requirements for Scientific Measurement and Shortcomings of Current Procedures
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24417/ilm1-2011imeko-029.pdf

A. Jackson Stenner, Mark Stone, Donald Burdick
How to Model and Test for the Mechanisms that Make Measurement Systems Tick
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24416/ilm1-2011imeko-027.pdf

Mark Wilson
The Role of Mathematical Models in Measurement: A Perspective from Psychometrics
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24178/ilm1-2011imeko-005.pdf

Also of interest will be Karl Ruhm’s plenary lecture and papers from the Fundamentals of Measurement Science session and the Special Session on the Role of Mathematical Models in Measurement:

Karl H. Ruhm
From Verbal Models to Mathematical Models – A Didactical Concept not just in Metrology
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24167/ilm1-2011imeko-002.pdf

Alessandro Giordani, Luca Mari
Quantity and Quantity Value
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24414/ilm1-2011imeko-025.pdf

Eric Benoit
Uncertainty in Fuzzy Scales Based Measurements
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24415/ilm1-2011imeko-020.pdf

Susanne C.N. Töpfer
Application of Mathematical Models in Optical Coordinate Metrology
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24445/ilm1-2011imeko-008.pdf

Giovanni Battista Rossi
Measurement Modelling: Foundations and Probabilistic Approach
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24446/ilm1-2011imeko-009.pdf

Sanowar H. Khan, Ludwik Finkelstein
The Role of Mathematical Modelling in the Analysis and Design of Measurement Systems
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24448/ilm1-2011imeko-010.pdf

Roman Z. Morawski
Application-Oriented Approach to Mathematical Modelling of Measurement Processes
http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24449/ilm1-2011imeko-011.pdf

Proposed U.S. Presidential Candidate Stump Speech

Over the course of our history, we have gotten a lot of things right in this country. Our political and economic principles and practices, not to speak of our technological innovations, have been models for countries the world over. The rest of the world has looked to us for leadership for a long time, and continues to do so.

Though some say our day in the sun might be over, I say we’ve hardly begun. We have new things to show the world. The problems we are facing as a nation right now have not come about because of flaws or failings in our basic principles. Those problems have come about because we have not yet creatively applied those principles in new ways, in new areas of our lives.

We have built our democracy and our economy on the ideas of equal rights and fair play, so that everyone has a chance to get into the game and make a place for themselves. Because of the way we have invested in these ideas over the last 235 years, this country has made big gains in bringing higher standards of living to more and more of our citizens, and to the citizens of countries on every continent. Along the way, there have been times when we’ve stumbled, but we’ve always picked ourselves back up and moved on to reach even higher standards than before.

We’ve been stumbling again here over these last few years. Though we continue to succeed with creative and innovative ideas in some areas, the world is changing. It isn’t enough for us to just react to the changes going on around us, or to resist those changes. We need to initiate changes of our own. Creating the future lets us predict it, lets us own it. Let me tell you about my vision of how we can create a new future together, a future that we can all own a piece of.

We have known for a long time that the richness of our lives depends on far more than the mere accumulation of material things. But despite that, the ongoing economic crisis has come about in large part precisely because we systematically put too much weight on material things in gauging our quality of life. But real wealth–and we all know this–the things that really make life worth living are not measured by any of the numbers that appear in the financial pages’ stock and economic indexes.

So efforts have been made to come up with numbers that will rise and fall with changes in our overall quality of life. New measures of real wealth, genuine progress, or happiness have been proposed. Many of us invest our retirement funds in stock indexes tied to socially responsible or environmentally sustainable corporate behaviors.

These are all steps in the right direction. But they fall short of what we need. More importantly, they fall short of what’s possible, and what’s already proven. Advances made in the social sciences over the last 50 years and more are setting the stage for a whole new array of exciting opportunities. It’s time to move these developments out of the lab and bring them to market. For instance, instead of relying on traditional statistics summarizing what’s going on at a high level, we need new measures that help us individually manage our investments in our own resources.

We say we manage what we measure, but, as I’ve already noted, we don’t have systems for measuring what’s really important in life. Are our skills, health, trustworthiness, and environmental quality really as important to us as we say they are? It would be natural to think, if they are that important, we would know how much of each of them we have and what they are worth. We ought to have ways of measuring these things, showing how much we each own, and knowing what it’s all worth. But we don’t.

Without those measures, we can’t effectively manage our own stocks of the resources most valuable to the quality of our lives. If we don’t know where we stand relative to one another or relative to where we were last week or last year, then we lack information vital to knowing how to move forward. And if we don’t know as individuals how to move forward, then we don’t know as a nation. If we do know as individuals where we stand and how to move forward, then we will also know as communities, and as managers in firms, classrooms, clinics, and hospitals.

The role of government in our lives is supposed to be to make things easier. And so to make it easier for everyone to manage the full range of the resources they have available to them, I now propose a new array of initiatives to be undertaken by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute for Standards and Technology, and the National Institutes of Health. These initiatives will focus on the research and education programs we need to create a new set of measurement standards, a kind of metric system that will give us the meaningful and precise numbers we need to manage the sources of our real wealth.

I will furthermore propose new legislation establishing an Intangible Assets Metric System as the legally binding terms for expressing the sources of real wealth in our lives. This law, when passed, as I’m sure it will be, will also establish each individual’s right to the free and clear ownership of their shares of human, social, and natural capital. Nothing is more important to the future of our nation, morally and economically, than each of us having a clear understanding of the value and worth of our reading, writing and math abilities, our health, our social relationships, and our environmental quality.

My administration will also reach out to industries and standards organizations of all kinds, but especially in economics, finance and accounting, to seek new creative ways for applying these measurement standards in managing our resources. I will also implement a new executive order establishing a wide range of new economic incentives designed to encourage investment in information systems for managing the new metrics in personalized accounts.

This series of initiatives will enable us to harmonize our efforts in new ways. We all know we can accomplish more working together as a team than we can alone. A new system of scientific, legal, and financial tools for managing our real wealth will make us a better team than ever. With these tools we will once again assert our leadership as innovators on a global scale, keeping the dream of a better life alive.

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For more on the science behind these ideas, and their potential applications, see previous posts in this blog, and the following:

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009, November). Invariance and traceability for measures of human, social, and natural capital: Theory and application. Measurement, 42(9), 1278-1287.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009, November 19). Draft legislation on development and adoption of an intangible assets metric system. Retrieved 6 January 2011, from http://livingcapitalmetrics.wordpress.com/2009/11/19/draft-legislation/.

Fisher, W. P.. Jr. (2009). NIST Critical national need idea White Paper: metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/pswp/upload/202_metrological_infrastructure_for_human_social_natural.pdf) Washington, DC: National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010, 30 September). Distinguishing between consistency and error in reliability coefficients: Improving the estimation and interpretation of information on measurement precision. LivingCapitalMetrics.com, Sausalito, California. Social Science Research Network [Online]. Available: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1685556 .

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010, 22 November). Meaningfulness, measurement, value seeking, and the corporate objective function: An introduction to new possibilities., LivingCapitalMetrics.com, Sausalito, California. Social Science Research Network [Online] (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1713467).

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010). The standard model in the history of the natural sciences, econometrics, and the social sciences. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 238(1), http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/238/1/012016/pdf/1742-6596_238_1_012016.pdf.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010). Statistics and measurement: Clarifying the differences. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 23(4), 1229-1230 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt234.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. In N. Brown, B. Duckor, K. Draney & M. Wilson (Eds.), Advances in Rasch Measurement, Vol. 2 (pp. 1-27). Maple Grove, MN: JAM Press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011). Measuring genuine progress by scaling economic indicators to think global & act local: An example from the UN millennium development goals project. LivingCapitalMetrics.com, Sausalito, California. Social Science Research Network [Online]. (http://ssrn.com/abstract=1739386).

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011). Stochastic and historical resonances of the unit in physics and psychometrics. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research & Perspectives, 9, 46-50.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012). Measure local, manage global: Intangible assets metric standards for sustainability. In J. Marques, S. Dhiman & S. Holt (Eds.), Business administration education: Changes in management and leadership strategies (in press). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012). What the world needs now: A bold plan for new standards. Standards Engineering, in press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Burton, E. (2010). Embedding measurement within existing computerized data systems: Scaling clinical laboratory and medical records heart failure data to predict ICU admission. Journal of Applied Measurement, 11(2), 271-287.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., Elbaum, B., & Coulter, W. A. (2012). Construction and validation of two parent-report scales for the evaluation of early intervention programs. Journal of Applied Measurement, 13, in press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., Eubanks, R. L., & Marier, R. L. (1997). Equating the MOS SF36 and the LSU HSI physical functioning scales. Journal of Outcome Measurement, 1(4), 329-362.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., Harvey, R. F., & Kilgore, K. M. (1995). New developments in functional assessment: Probabilistic models for gold standards. NeuroRehabilitation, 5(1), 3-25.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., Harvey, R. F., Taylor, P., Kilgore, K. M., & Kelly, C. K. (1995, February). Rehabits: A common language of functional assessment. Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, 76(2), 113-122.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Karabatsos, G. (2005). Fundamental measurement for the MEPS and CAHPS quality of care scales. In N. Bezruczko (Ed.), Rasch measurement in the health sciences (pp. 373-410). Maple Grove, MN: JAM Press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011). Geometric and algebraic formulations of scientific laws: Mathematical principles for phenomenology. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, in review.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011, April). Integrating qualitative and quantitative research approaches via the phenomenological method. International Journal of Multiple Research Approaches, 5(1), 89-103.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011). Making clear what something is:  Scientific law, construct validity and reliability in measuring reading ability. Psychological Methods, in review.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011, January). Metrology for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences (Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences White Paper Series). Retrieved 25 October 2011, from National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/submission_detail.cfm?upld_id=36.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Wright, B. D. (Eds.). (1994). Applications of probabilistic conjoint measurement (Special Issue). International Journal of Educational Research, 21(6), 557-664.

Heinemann, A. W., Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Gershon, R. (2006). Improving health care quality with outcomes management. Journal of Prosthetics and Orthotics, 18(1), 46-50 [http://www.oandp.org/jpo/library/2006_01S_046.asp] .

Solloway, S., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2007). Mindfulness in measurement: Reconsidering the measurable in mindfulness. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 26, 58-81 [http://www.transpersonalstudies.org/volume_26_2007.html].

Sumner, J., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2008). The moral construct of caring in nursing as communicative action: The theory and practice of a caring science. Advances in Nursing Science, 31(4), E19-E36.

Open Letter on New Infrastructure as a Platform for Economic Growth and Scientific Innovation

Dear Thought Leaders Everywhere,

As you are no doubt well aware, one issue in particular is being brought to a head by the lingering economic malaise and the continuing situation in Europe: the austerity measures needed for countering debt problems are going to severely limit growth potentials, if they do not lead straight to recession or depression, unless sources of new efficiencies are found. Given the huge existing levels of debt, it is increasingly difficult to justify the capital injections the economy needs, so thinkers from Paul Krugman to Bill Clinton have proposed the possibility that some new technical infrastructure could provide a platform for new growth, much as the Internet has.

Energy might be a productive area to focus on, for instance. Others go straight to immediately available technologies, and speak of investments in existing infrastructure, such as roads and bridges. But even if a program for bringing that kind of concrete engineering up to full capacity was put in place, it would provide only a small fraction of the jobs and growth actually needed.

The basic idea is right on the mark, though no one seems to realize there are types of infrastructure beyond tangible assets like energy, or roads and bridges. Stop a second and think about it. We say we manage what we measure. Standardized weights and measures are widely recognized as an essential core feature of productivity and innovation in science, engineering, and the economy. But existing standardized metrics are exclusively focused on physics and chemistry, machines and tools, and property. And that’s the problem: manufactured capital and property make up only about 10% of all the capital under management.

What’s the other 90%? Human capital: skills, motivations, health. Social capital: trust, commitment, loyalty. Natural capital: water and air purification services, genetic variation, fisheries. Why don’t we have standardized weights and measures for managing these essential core areas of education, health care, human and natural resource management, social services, etc.? After all, if we manage what we measure, and we lack measures for the vast majority of the capital in the economy, we are probably lucky to be doing as well as we are. Our faith in efficient markets is not misplaced as much as we have not yet really made it central to the economics of every form of capital.

There are a lot of reasons why we don’t have standardized metrics for measuring individual amounts of intangible assets like human, social, and natural capital, but the supposed “subjectivity” of those forms of capital is NOT one of them. Decades of research and practice prove the viability of the technology needed for unifying the measurement of everything from literacy capital to health capital, from social capital to natural capital. What stands in our way as a society has much more to do with preconceptions and unexamined assumptions than with the supposed “soft” nature of the social sciences and psychology.

White papers published online by NIST and NSF, and a recent award-winning essay forthcoming in Standards Engineering (full references are listed below), provide rational justifications for a new research agenda focused on developing and implementing an intangible assets metric system. Such a system would enable us to act on the truth that we can accomplish far more working together cooperatively in a common framework than we can as individuals.

Better measurement is essential to better management. In the context of today’s pressing economic and social issues, new questions about the way we manage every form of resource need to be raised. You are in a position from which these questions can be effectively put forward for consideration by thought leaders across a wide array of disciplines and industries. We hope you will see fit to do so. If we can be of any further assistance, please do not hesitate to let us know. Thank you.

Sincerely,

William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.

A. Jackson Stenner, Ph.D.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009). NIST Critical national need idea White Paper: metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (Tech. Rep. No. http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/pswp/upload/202_metrological_infrastructure_for_human_social_natural.pdf). Washington, DC: National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012). What the world needs now: A bold plan for new standards. Standards Engineering, forthcoming. For the ANSI press release, see http://webstore.ansi.org/NewsDetail.aspx?NewsGuid=590a225c-d779-4f81-804e-4d05ef239c37.)

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011, January). Metrology for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences (Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences White Paper Series). Retrieved 25 October 2011, from National Science Foundation: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/submission_detail.cfm?upld_id=36.

 

Externalities are to markets as anomalies are to scientific laws

Economic externalities are to efficient markets as any consistent anomaly is relative to a lawful regularity. Government intervention in markets is akin to fudging the laws of physics to explain the wobble in Uranus’ orbit, or to explain why magnetized masses would not behave like wooden or stone masses in a metal catapult (Rasch’s example). Further, government intervention in markets is necessary only as long as efficient markets for externalized forms of capital are not created. The anomalous exceptions to the general rule of market efficiency have long since been shown to themselves be internally consistent lawful regularities in their own right amenable to configuration as markets for human, social and natural forms of capital.

There is an opportunity here for the concise and elegant statement of the efficient markets hypothesis, the observation of certain anomalies, the formulation of new theories concerning these forms of capital, the framing of efficient markets hypotheses concerning the behavior of these anomalies, tests of these hypotheses in terms of the inverse proportionality of two of the parameters relative to the third, proposals as to the uniform metrics by which the scientific laws will be made commercially viable expressions of capital value, etc.

We suffer from the illusion that trading activity somehow spontaneously emerges from social interactions. It’s as though comparable equivalent value is some kind of irrefutable, incontestable feature of the world to which humanity adapts its institutions. But this order of things plainly puts the cart before the horse when the emergence of markets is viewed historically. The idea of fair trade, how it is arranged, how it is recognized, when it is appropriate, etc. varies markedly across cultures and over time.

Yes, “’the price of things is in inverse ratio to the quantity offered and in direct ratio to the quantity demanded’ (Walras 1965, I, 216-17)” (Mirowski, 1988, p. 20). Yes, Pareto made “a direct extrapolation of the path-independence of equilibrium energy states in rational mechanics and thermodynamics” to “the path-independence of the realization of utility” (Mirowski, 1988, p. 21). Yes, as Ehrenfest showed, “an analogy between thermodynamics and economics” can be made, and economic concepts can be formulated “as parallels of thermodynamic concepts, with the concept of equilibrium occupying the central position in both theories” (Boumans, 2005, p. 31).  But markets are built up around these lawful regularities by skilled actors who articulate the rules, embody the roles, and initiate the relationships comprising economic, legal, and scientific institutions. “The institutions define the market, rather than the reverse” (Miller & O’Leary, 2007, p. 710). What we need are new institutions built up around the lawful regularities revealed by Rasch models. The problem is how to articulate the rules, embody the roles, and initiate the relationships.

Noyes (1936, pp. 2, 13; quoted in De Soto 2000, p. 158) provides some useful pointers:

“The chips in the economic game today are not so much the physical goods and actual services that are almost exclusively considered in economic text books, as they are that elaboration of legal relations which we call property…. One is led, by studying its development, to conceive the social reality as a web of intangible bonds–a cobweb of invisible filaments–which surround and engage the individual and which thereby organize society…. And the process of coming to grips with the actual world we live in is the process of objectivizing these relations.”

 Noyes (1936, p. 20, quoted in De Soto 2000, p. 163) continues:

“Human nature demands regularity and certainty and this demand requires that these primitive judgments be consistent and thus be permitted to crystallize into certain rules–into ‘this body of dogma or systematized prediction which we call law.’ … The practical convenience of the public … leads to the recurrent efforts to systematize the body of laws. The demand for codification is a demand of the people to be released from the mystery and uncertainty of unwritten or even of case law.” [This is quite an apt statement of the largely unstated demands of the Occupy Wall Street movement.]

  De Soto (2000, p. 158) explains:

 ”Lifting the bell jar [integrating legal and extralegal property rights], then, is principally a legal challenge. The official legal order must interact with extralegal arrangements outside the bell jar to create a social contract on property and capital. To achieve this integration, many other disciplines are of course necessary … [economists, urban planners, agronomists, mappers, surveyers, IT specialists, etc]. But ultimately, an integrated national social contract will be concretized only in laws.”

  “Implementing major legal change is a political responsibility. There are various reasons for this. First, law is generally concerned with protecting property rights. However, the real task in developing and former communist countries is not so much to perfect existing rights as to give everyone a right to property rights–’meta-rights,’ if you will. [Paraphrasing, the real task in the undeveloped domains of human, social, and natural capital is not so much the perfection of existing rights as it is to harness scientific measurement in the name of economic justice and grant everyone legal title to their shares of their ownmost personal properties, their abilities, health, motivations, and trustworthiness, along with their shares of the common stock of social and natural resources.] Bestowing such meta-rights, emancipating people from bad law, is a political job. Second, very small but powerful vested interests–mostly repre- [p. 159] sented by the countries best commercial lawyers–are likely to oppose change unless they are convinced otherwise. Bringing well-connected and moneyed people onto the bandwagon requires not consultants committed to serving their clients but talented politicians committed to serving their people. Third, creating an integrated system is not about drafting laws and regulations that look good on paper but rather about designing norms that are rooted in people’s beliefs and are thus more likely to be obeyed and enforced. Being in touch with real people is a politician’s task. Fourth, prodding underground economies to become legal is a major political sales job.”

 De Soto continues (p. 159), intending to refer only to real estate but actually speaking of the need for formal legal title to personal property of all kinds, which ought to include human, social, and natural capital:

  “Without succeeding on these legal and political fronts, no nation can overcome the legal apartheid between those who can create capital and those who cannot. Without formal property, no matter how many assets they accumulate or how hard they work, most people will not be able to prosper in a capitalist society. They will continue to remain beyond the radar of policymakers, out of the reach of official records, and thus economically invisible.”

Boumans, M. (2005). How economists model the world into numbers. New York: Routledge.

De Soto, H. (2000). The mystery of capital: Why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else. New York: Basic Books.

Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (2007, October/November). Mediating instruments and making markets: Capital budgeting, science and the economy. Accounting, Organizations, and Society, 32(7-8), 701-34.

Mirowski, P. (1988). Against mechanism: Protecting economics from science. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Noyes, C. R. (1936). The institution of property. New York: Longman’s Green.

Rasch Measurement as a Basis for a New Standards Framework

The 2011 U.S. celebration of World Standards Day took place on October 13 at the Fairmont Hotel in Washington, D.C., with the theme of “Advancing Safety and Sustainability Standards Worldwide.” The evening began with a reception in a hall of exhibits from the celebrations sponsors, which included the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the Society for Standards Professionals (SES), the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), Microsoft, IEEE, Underwriters Laboratories, the Consumer Electronics Association, ASME, ASTM International, Qualcomm, Techstreet, and many others. Several speakers took the podium after dinner to welcome the 400 or so attendees and to present the World Standards Day Paper Competition Awards and the Ronald H. Brown Standards Leadership Award.

Dr. Patrick Gallagher, Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology, and Director of NIST, was the first speaker after dinner. He directed his remarks at the value of a decentralized, voluntary, and demand-driven system of standards in promoting innovation and economic prosperity. Gallagher emphasized that “standards provide the common language that keeps domestic and international trade flowing,” concluding that “it is difficult to overestimate their critical value to both the U.S. and global economy.”

James Shannon, President of the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA), accepted the R. H. Brown Standards Leadership Award in recognition for his work initiating or improving the National Electrical Code, the Life Safety Code, and the Fire Safe Cigarette and Residential Sprinkler Campaigns.

Ellen Emard, President of SES, introduced the paper competition award winners. As of this writing the titles and authors of the first and second place awards are not yet available on the SES web site (http://www.ses-standards.org/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=56). I took third place for my paper, “What the World Needs Now: A Bold Plan for New Standards.” Where the other winning papers took up traditional engineering issues concerning the role of standards in advancing safety and sustainability issues, my paper spoke to the potential scientific and economic benefits that could be realized by standard metrics and common product definitions for outcomes in education, health care, social services, and environmental resource management. All three of the award-winning papers will appear in a forthcoming issue of Standards Engineering, the journal of SES.

I was coincidentally seated at the dinner alongside Gordon Gillerman, winner of third place in the 2004 paper competition (http://www.ses-standards.org/associations/3698/files/WSD%202004%20-%203%20-%20Gillerman.pdf) and currently Chief of the Standards Services Division at NIST. Gillerman has a broad range of experience in coordinating standards across multiple domains, including environmental protection, homeland security, safety, and health care. Having recently been involved in a workshop focused on measuring, evaluating, and improving the usability of electronic health records (http://www.nist.gov/healthcare/usability/upload/EHR-Usability-Workshop-2011-6-03-2011_final.pdf), Gillerman was quite interested in the potential Rasch measurement techniques hold for reducing data volume with no loss of information, and so for streamlining computer interfaces.

Robert Massof of Johns Hopkins University accompanied me to the dinner, and was seated at a nearby table. Also at Massof’s table were several representatives of the National Institute of Building Sciences, some of whom Massof had recently met at a workshop on adaptations for persons with low vision disabilities. Massof’s work equating the main instruments used for assessing visual function in low vision rehabilitation could lead to a standard metric useful in improving the safety and convenience of buildings.

As is stated in educational materials distributed at the World Standards Day celebration by ANSI, standards are a constant behind-the-scenes presence in nearly all areas of everyday life. Everything from air, water, and food to buildings, clothing, automobiles, roads, and electricity are produced in conformity with voluntary consensus standards of various kinds. In the U.S. alone, more than 100,000 standards specify product and system features and interconnections, making it possible for appliances to tap the electrical grid with the same results no matter where they are plugged in, and for products of all kinds to be purchased with confidence. Life is safer and more convenient, and science and industry are more innovative and profitable, because of standards.

The point of my third-place paper is that life could be even safer and more convenient, and science and industry could be yet more innovative and profitable, if standards and conformity assessment procedures for outcomes in education, health care, social services, and environmental resource management were developed and implemented. Rasch measurement demonstrates the consistent reproducibility of meaningful measures across samples and different collections of construct-relevant items. Within any specific area of interest, then, Rasch measures have the potential of serving as the kind of mediating instruments or objects recognized as essential to the process of linking science with the economy (Fisher & Stenner, 2011b; Hussenot & Missonier, 2010; Miller & O’Leary, 2007). Recent white papers published by NIST and NSF document the challenges and benefits likely to be encountered and produced by initiatives moving in this direction (Fisher, 2009; Fisher & Stenner, 2011a).

A diverse array of Rasch measurement presentations were made at the recent International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) meeting of metrology engineers in Jena, Germany (see RMT 25 (1), p. 1318). With that start at a new dialogue between the natural and social sciences, the NIST and NSF white papers, and with the award in the World Standards Day paper competition, the U.S. and international standards development communities have shown their interest in exploring possibilities for a new array of standard units of measurement, standardized outcome product definitions, standard conformity assessment procedures, and outcome product quality standards. The increasing acceptance and recognition of the viability of such standards is a logical consequence of observations like these:

• “Where this law [relating reading ability and text difficulty to comprehension rate] can be applied it provides a principle of measurement on a ratio scale of both stimulus parameters and object parameters, the conceptual status of which is comparable to that of measuring mass and force. Thus…the reading accuracy of a child…can be measured with the same kind of objectivity as we may tell its weight” (Rasch, 1960, p. 115).
• “Today there is no methodological reason why social science cannot become as stable, as reproducible, and hence as useful as physics” (Wright, 1997, p. 44).
• “…when the key features of a statistical model relevant to the analysis of social science data are the same as those of the laws of physics, then those features are difficult to ignore” (Andrich, 1988, p. 22).

Rasch’s work has been wrongly assimilated in social science research practice as just another example of the “standard model” of statistical analysis. Rasch measurement rightly ought instead to be treated as a general articulation of the three-variable structure of natural law useful in framing the context of scientific practice. That is, Rasch’s models ought to be employed primarily in calibrating instruments quantitatively interpretable at the point of use in a mathematical language shared by a community of research and practice. To be shared in this way as a universally uniform coin of the realm, that language must be embodied in a consensus standard defining universally uniform units of comparison.

Rasch measurement offers the potential of shifting the focus of quantitative psychosocial research away from data analysis to integrated qualitative and quantitative methods enabling the definition of standard units and the calibration of instruments measuring in that unit. An intangible assets metric system will, in turn, support the emergence of new product- and performance-based standards, management system standards, and personnel certification standards. Reiterating once again Rasch’s (1960, p. xx) insight, we can acknowledge with him that “this is a huge challenge, but once the problem has been formulated it does seem possible to meet it.”

 References

Andrich, D. (1988). Rasch models for measurement. (Vols. series no. 07-068). Sage University Paper Series on Quantitative Applications in the Social Sciences. Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications.

Fisher, W. P.. Jr. (2009). Metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (NIST Critical National Need Idea White Paper Series, Retrieved 25 October 2011 from http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/pswp/upload/202_metrological_infrastructure_for_human_social_natural.pdf). Washington, DC: National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011a, January). Metrology for the social, behavioral, and economic sciences (Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences White Paper Series). Retrieved 25 October 2011 from http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/submission_detail.cfm?upld_id=36. Washington, DC: National Science Foundation.

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011b). A technology roadmap for intangible assets metrology. In Fundamentals of measurement science. International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO), Jena, Germany, August 31 to September 2.

Hussenot, A., & Missonier, S. (2010). A deeper understanding of evolution of the role of the object in organizational process. The concept of ‘mediation object.’ Journal of Organizational Change Management, 23(3), 269-286.

Miller, P., & O’Leary, T. (2007, October/November). Mediating instruments and making markets: Capital budgeting, science and the economy. Accounting, Organizations, and Society, 32(7-8), 701-34.

Rasch, G. (1960). Probabilistic models for some intelligence and attainment tests (Reprint, with Foreword and Afterword by B. D. Wright, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980). Copenhagen, Denmark: Danmarks Paedogogiske Institut.

Wright, B. D. (1997, Winter). A history of social science measurement. Educational Measurement: Issues and Practice, 16(4), 33-45, 52 [http://www.rasch.org/memo62.htm].

We, the people

We, the people of the planet Earth, hold the following as self-evident truths:
1. that our abilities, skills, motivations, and health provide the labor employed in the global economy;
2. that our trust, loyalty, commitment, and integrity are essential to all contracts, explicit and implicit; and
3. that nature’s regenerative powers and ecosystem services are what make  air breathable, water drinkable, food nourishing, and this planet inhabitable. 

We the people further hold these human, social, and natural resources to be the forms of capital most fundamentally essential to the functioning of the economy. And we the people find that, when placed alongside the true wealth of our living capital, the value of property, machines and money is worth much less. We further find that, though nature’s irreplaceable ecosystem services are priceless, our living capital resources might conservatively be estimated as amounting to 90% or more of the total volume of capital under management in the global economy. 

We the people recognize scholarly works showing that economic prosperity has historically followed from four factors: private property rights, scientific rationality, access to capital, and functional transportation and communication networks. 

In light of these self-evident truths and results of scholarly study, we the people want to know why the four factors creating economic prosperity have not yet been applied to living capital. Why is there not even any discussion of whether these four factors could or should be applied to 90% of the capital under management? Quite apart from academic arguments concerning what scientific rationality is or is not, why aren’t any of these issues on anyone’s agenda?

We, the people of the world, want to know. Why?

Question Authority: Queries In the Back of the Wall Street Demonstrators’ Minds

I think the Wall Street demonstrators’ lack of goals and the admission of not having a solution is very important. All solutions offered so far are band-aids at best, and most are likely to do more harm than good.

I think I have an innovative way of articulating the questions people have on their minds. I thought of scattering small pieces of paper anywhere there are these demonstrations going on, with questions like these on them:

Feeling robbed of the trust, loyalty, and commitment you invested?

Unable to get a good return on your investment in your education?

Feeling robbed of your share of the world’s natural resources?

How many shares of social capital do you own?

How many shares of literacy capital do you have on the market?

How many shares of health capital do you own?

How many shares of natural capital do you own?

Wishing there was an easy way to know what return rate you get on your health investments?

Wishing there was an easy way to know what return rate you get on your education investments?

Why don’t you have legal title to your literacy capital shares?

Why don’t you have legal title to your social capital shares?

Why don’t you have legal title to your health capital shares?

Why don’t you have legal title to your natural capital shares?

Why don’t you know how many literacy capital shares are rightfully yours?

Why don’t you know how many social capital shares are rightfully yours?

Why don’t you know how many health capital shares are rightfully yours?

Why don’t you know how many natural capital shares are rightfully yours?

Why is there no common currency for trading on your literacy capital?

Why is there no common currency for trading on your health capital?

Why is there no common currency for trading on your social capital?

Why is there no common currency for trading on your natural capital?

Why aren’t corporations accountable for their impacts on your literacy capital investments?

Why aren’t corporations accountable for their impacts on your natural capital investments?

Why aren’t corporations accountable for their impacts on your social capital investments?

Why aren’t corporations accountable for their impacts on your health capital investments?

Why aren’t governments accountable for their impacts on your literacy capital investments?

Why aren’t governments accountable for their impacts on your natural capital investments?

Why aren’t governments accountable for their impacts on your social capital investments?

Why aren’t governments accountable for their impacts on your health capital investments?

Why are educational outcomes not comparable in a common metric?

Why are health care outcomes not comparable in a common metric?

Why are social program outcomes not comparable in a common metric?

Why are natural resource management program outcomes not comparable in a common metric?

Why do accounting and economics focus on land, labor, and manufactured capital instead of putting the value of ecosystem services, and health, literacy, and social capital, on the books and in the models, along with property and manufactured capital?

If we truly do manage what we measure, why don’t we have a metric system for literacy capital?

Can we effectively manage literacy capital if we don’t have a universally recognized and accepted metric for it?

If we truly do manage what we measure, why don’t we have a metric system for health capital?

Can we effectively manage health capital if we don’t have a universally recognized and accepted metric for it?

If we truly do manage what we measure, why don’t we have a metric system for social capital?

Can we effectively manage social capital if we don’t have a universally recognized and accepted metric for it?

If we truly do manage what we measure, why don’t we have a metric system for natural capital?

Can we effectively manage natural capital if we don’t have a universally recognized and accepted metric for it?

How is our collective imagination being stifled by the lack of a common language for literacy capital?

How is our collective imagination being stifled by the lack of a common language for health capital?

How is our collective imagination being stifled by the lack of a common language for social capital?

How is our collective imagination being stifled by the lack of a common language for natural capital?

How can the voice of the people be heard without common languages for things that are important to us?

How do we know where we stand as individuals and as a society if we can’t track the value and volume of our literacy, health, social, and natural capital shares?

Why don’t NIST and NSF fund new research into literacy, health, social, and natural capital metrics?

Why aren’t banks required to offer literacy, health, social, and natural capital accounts?

If we want to harmonize relationships between people, within and between societies, and between culture and nature, why don’t we tune the instruments on which we play the music of our lives?

Reimagining Capitalism Again, Part III: Reflections on Greider’s “Bold Ideas” in The Nation

And so, The Nation’s “Bold Ideas for a New Economy” is disappointing for not doing more to start from the beginning identified by its own writer, William Greider. The soul of capitalism needs to be celebrated and nourished, if we are to make our economy “less destructive and domineering,” and “more focused on what people really need for fulfilling lives.” The only real alternative to celebrating and nourishing the soul of capitalism is to kill it, in the manner of the Soviet Union’s failed experiments in socialism and communism.

The article speaks the truth, though, when it says there is no point in trying to persuade the powers that be to make the needed changes. Republicans see the market as it exists as a one-size-fits-all economic panacea, when all it can accomplish in its current incomplete state is the continuing externalization of anything and everything important about human, social, and environmental decency. For their part, Democrats do indeed “insist that regulation will somehow fix whatever is broken,” in an ever-expanding socialistic micromanagement of every possible exception to the rules that emerges.

To date, the president’s efforts at a nonpartisan third way amount only to vacillations between these opposing poles. The leadership that is needed, however, is something else altogether. Yes, as The Nation article says, capitalism needs to be made to serve the interests of society, and this will require deep structural change, not just new policies. But none of the contributors of the “bold ideas” presented propose deep structural changes of a kind that actually gets at the soul of capitalism. All of the suggestions are ultimately just new policies tweaking superficial aspects of the economy in mechanical, static, and very limited ways.

The article calls for “Democratizing reforms that will compel business and finance to share decision-making and distribute rewards more fairly.” It says the vision has different names but “the essence is a fundamental redistribution of power and money.” But corporate distortions of liability law, the introduction of boardroom watchdogs, and a tax on financial speculation do not by any stretch of the imagination address the root causes of social and environmental irresponsibility in business. They “sound like obscure technical fixes” because that’s what they are. The same thing goes for low-cost lending from public banks, the double or triple bottom lines of Benefit Corporations, new anti-trust laws, calls for “open information” policies, added personal stakes for big-time CEOs, employee ownership plans, the elimination of tax subsidies for, new standards for sound investing, new measures of GDP, and government guarantees of full employment.

All of these proposals sound like what ought to be the effects and outcomes of efforts addressing the root causes of capitalisms’ shortcomings. Instead, they are band aids applied to scratched fingers and arms when multiple by-pass surgery is called for. That is, what we need is to understand how to bring the spirit of capitalism to life in the new domains of human, social, and environmental interests, but what we’re getting are nothing but more of the same piecemeal ways of moving around the deck chairs on the Titanic.

There is some truth in the assertion that what really needs reinventing is our moral and spiritual imagination. As someone (Einstein or Edison?) is supposed to have put it, originality is simply a matter of having a source for an analogy no one else has considered. Ironically, the best model is often the one most taken for granted and nearest to hand. Such is the case with the two-sided scientific and economic effects of standardized units of measurement. The fundamental moral aspect here is nothing other than the Golden Rule, independently derived and offered in cultures throughout history, globally. Individualized social measurement is nothing if not a matter of determining whether others are being treated in the way you yourself would want to be treated.

And so, yes, to stress the major point of agreement with The Nation, “the new politics does not start in Washington.” Historically, at their best, governments work to keep pace with the social and technical innovations introduced by their peoples. Margaret Mead said it well a long time ago when she asserted that small groups of committed citizens are the only sources of real social change.

Not to be just one of many “advocates with bold imaginations” who wind up marginalized by the constraints of status quo politics, I claim my personal role in imagining a new economic future by tapping as deeply as I can into the positive, pre-existing structures needed for a transition into a new democratic capitalism. We learn through what we already know. Standards are well established as essential to commerce and innovation, but 90% of the capital under management in our economy—the human, social, and natural capital—lacks the standards needed for optimal market efficiency and effectiveness. An intangible assets metric system will be a vitally important way in which we extend what is right and good in the world today into new domains.

To conclude, what sets this proposal apart from those offered by The Nation and its readers hinges on our common agreement that “the most threatening challenge to capitalism is arguably the finite carrying capacity of the natural world.” The bold ideas proposed by The Nation’s readers respond to this challenge in ways that share an important feature in common: people have to understand the message and act on it. That fact dooms all of these ideas from the start. If we have to articulate and communicate a message that people then have to act on, we remain a part of the problem and not part of the solution.

As I argue in my “The Problem is the Problem” blog post of some months ago, this way of defining problems is itself the problem. That is, we can no longer think of ourselves as separate from the challenges we face. If we think we are not all implicated through and through as participants in the construction and maintenance of the problem, then we have not understood it. The bold ideas offered to date are all responses to the state of a broken system that seek to reform one or another element in the system when what we need is a whole new system.

What we need is a system that so fully embodies nature’s own ecological wisdom that the medium becomes the message. When the ground rules for economic success are put in place such that it is impossible to earn a profit without increasing stocks of human, social, and natural capital, there will be no need to spell out the details of a microregulatory structure of controlling new anti-trust laws, “open information” policies, personal stakes for big-time CEOs, employee ownership plans, the elimination of tax subsidies, etc. What we need is precisely what Greider reported from Innovest in his book: reliable, high quality information that makes human, social, and environmental issues matter financially. Situated in a context like that described by Bernstein in his 2004 The Birth of Plenty, with the relevant property rights, rule of law, scientific rationality, capital markets, and communications networks in place, it will be impossible to stop a new economic expansion of historic proportions.

Reimagining Capitalism Again, Part II: Scientific Credibility in Improving Information Quality

The previous posting here concluded with two questions provoked by a close consideration of a key passage in William Greider’s 2003 book, The Soul of Capitalism. First, how do we create the high quality, solid information markets need to punish and reward relative to ethical and sustainable human, social, and environmental values? Second, what can we learn from the way we created that kind of information for property and manufactured capital? There are good answers to these questions, answers that point in productive directions in need of wide exploration and analysis.

The short answer to both questions is that better, more scientifically rigorous measurement at the local level needs to be implemented in a context of traceability to universally uniform standards. To think global and act local simultaneously, we need an efficient and transparent way of seeing where we stand in the world relative to everyone else. Having measures expressed in comparable and meaningful units is an important part of how we think global while acting local.

So, for markets to punish and reward businesses in ways able to build human, social, and environmental value, we need to be able to price that value, to track returns on investments in it, and to own shares of it. To do that, we need a new intangible assets metric system that functions in a manner analogous to the existing metric system and other weights and measures standards. In the same way these standards guarantee high quality information on volume, weight, thermal units, and volts in grocery stores and construction sites, we need a new set of standards for human abilities, performances, and health; for social trust, commitment, and loyalty; and for the environment’s air and water processing services, fisheries, gene pools, etc.

Each industry needs an instrumentarium of tools and metrics that mediate relationships universally within its entire sphere of production and/or service. The obvious and immediate reaction to this proposal will likely be that this is impossible, that it would have been done by now if it was possible, and that anyone who proposes something like this is simply unrealistic, perhaps dangerously so. So, here we have another reason to add to those given in the June 8, 2011 issue of The Nation (http://www.thenation.com/article/161267/reimagining-capitalism-bold-ideas-new-economy) as to why bold ideas for a new economy cannot gain any traction in today’s political discourse.

So what basis in scientific authority might be found for this audacious goal of an intangible assets metric system? This blog’s postings offer multiple varieties of evidence and argument in this regard, so I’ll stick to more recent developments, namely, last week’s meeting of the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) in Jena, Germany. Membership in IMEKO is dominated by physicists, engineers, chemists, and clinical laboratorians who work in private industry, academia, and government weights and measures standards institutes.

Several IMEKO members past and present are involved with one or more of the seven or eight major international standards organizations responsible for maintaining and improving the metric system (the Systeme Internationale des Unites). Two initiatives undertaken by IMEKO and these standards organizations take up the matter at issue here concerning the audacious goal of standard units for human, social, and natural capital.

First, the recently released third edition of the International Vocabulary of Measurement (VIM, 2008) expands the range of the concepts and terms included to encompass measurement in the human and social sciences. This first effort was not well informed as to the nature of widely realized state of the art developments in measurement in education, health care, and the social sciences. What is important is that an invitation to further dialogue has been extended from the natural to the social sciences.

That invitation was unintentionally accepted and a second initiative advanced just as the new edition of the VIM was being released, in 2008. Members of three IMEKO technical committees (TC 1-7-13; those on Measurement Science, Metrology Education, and Health Care) cultivate a special interest in ideas on the human and social value of measurement. At their 2008 meeting in Annecy, France, I presented a paper (later published in revised form as Fisher, 2009) illustrating how, over the previous 50 years and more, the theory and practice of measurement in the social sciences had developed in ways capable of supporting convenient and useful universally uniform units for human, social, and natural capital.

The same argument was then advanced by my fellow University of Chicago alum, Nikolaus Bezruczko, at the 2009 IMEKO World Congress in Lisbon. Bezruczko and I both spoke at the 2010 TC 1-7-13 meeting in London, and last week our papers were joined by presentations from six of our colleagues at the 2011 IMEKO TC 1-7-13 meeting in Jena, Germany. Another fellow U Chicagoan, Mark Wilson, a long time professor in the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Berkeley, gave an invited address contrasting four basic approaches to measurement in psychometrics, and emphasizing the value of methods that integrate substantive meaning with mathematical rigor.

Examples from education, health care, and business were then elucidated at this year’s meeting in Jena by myself, Bezruczko, Stefan Cano (University of Plymouth, England), Carl Granger (SUNY, Buffalo; paper presented by Bezruczko, a co-author), Thomas Salzberger (University of Vienna, Austria), Jack Stenner (MetaMetrics, Inc., Durham, NC, USA), and Gordon Cooper (University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia; paper presented by Fisher, a co-author).

The contrast between these presentations and those made by the existing IMEKO membership hinges on two primary differences in focus. The physicists and engineers take it for granted that all instrument calibration involves traceability to metrological reference standards. Dealing as they are with existing standards and physical or chemical materials that usually possess deterministically structured properties, issues of how to construct linear measures from ordinal observations never come up.

Conversely, the social scientists and psychometricians take it for granted that all instrument calibration involves evaluations of the capacity of ordinal observations to support the construction of linear measures. Dealing as they are with data from tests, surveys, and rating scale assessments, issues of how to relate a given instrument’s unit to a reference standard never come up.

Thus there is significant potential for mutually instructive dialogue between natural and social scientists in this context. Many areas of investigation in the natural sciences have benefited from the introduction of probabilistic concepts in recent decades, but there are perhaps important unexplored opportunities for the application of probabilistic measurement, as opposed to statistical, models. By taking advantage of probabilistic models’ special features, measurement in education and health care has begun to realize the benefit of broad generalizations of comparable units across grades, schools, tests, and curricula.

Though the focus of my interest here is in the capacity of better measurement to improve the efficiency of human, social, and natural capital markets, it may turn out that as many or more benefits will accrue in the natural sciences’ side of the conversation as in the social sciences’ side. The important thing for the time being is that the dialogue is started. New and irreversible mutual understandings between natural and social scientists have already been put on the record. It may happen that the introduction of a new supply of improved human, social, and natural capital metrics will help articulate the largely, as yet, unstated but nonetheless urgent demand for them.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009, November). Invariance and traceability for measures of human, social, and natural capital: Theory and application. Measurement, 42(9), 1278-1287.

Reimagining Capitalism Again, Part I: Reflections on Greider’s Soul of Capitalism

In his 2003 book, The Soul of Capitalism, William Greider wrote, “If capitalism were someday found to have a soul, it would probably be located in the mystic qualities of capital itself” (p. 94). The recurring theme in the book is that the resolution of capitalism’s deep conflicts must grow out as organic changes from the roots of capitalism itself.

In the book, Greider quotes Innovest’s Michael Kiernan as suggesting that the goal has to be re-engineering the DNA of Wall Street (p. 119). He says the key to doing this is good reliable information that has heretofore been unavailable but which will make social and environmental issues matter financially. The underlying problems of exactly what solid, high quality information looks like, where it comes from, and how it is created are not stated or examined, but the point, as Kiernan says, is that “the markets are pretty good at punishing and rewarding.” The objective is to use “the financial markets as an engine of reform and positive change rather than destruction.”

This objective is, of course, the focus of multiple postings in this blog (see especially this one and this one). From my point of view, capitalism indeed does have a soul and it is actually located in the qualities of capital itself. Think about it: if a soul is a spirit of something that exists independent of its physical manifestation, then the soul of capitalism is the fungibility of capital. Now, this fungibility is complex and ambiguous. It takes its strength and practical value from the way market exchange are represented in terms of currencies, monetary units that, within some limits, provide an objective basis of comparison useful for rewarding those capable of matching supply with demand.

But the fungibility of capital can also be dangerously misconceived when the rich complexity and diversity of human capital is unjustifiably reduced to labor, when the irreplaceable value of natural capital is unjustifiably reduced to land, and when the trust, loyalty, and commitment of social capital is completely ignored in financial accounting and economic models. As I’ve previously said in this blog, the concept of human capital is inherently immoral so far as it reduces real human beings to interchangeable parts in an economic machine.

So how could it ever be possible to justify any reduction of human, social, and natural value to a mere number? Isn’t this the ultimate in the despicable inhumanity of economic logic, corporate decision making, and, ultimately, the justification of greed? Many among us who profess liberal and progressive perspectives seem to have an automatic and reactionary prejudice of this kind. This makes these well-intentioned souls as much a part of the problem as those among us with sometimes just as well-intentioned perspectives that accept such reductionism as the price of entry into the game.

There is another way. Human, social, and natural value can be measured and made manageable in ways that do not necessitate totalizing reduction to a mere number. The problem is not reduction itself, but unjustified, totalizing reduction. Referring to all people as “man” or “men” is an unjustified reduction dangerous in the way it focuses attention only on males. The tendency to think and act in ways privileging males over females that is fostered by this sense of “man” shortchanges us all, and has happily been largely eliminated from discourse.

Making language more inclusive does not, however, mean that words lose the singular specificity they need to be able to refer to things in the world. Any given word represents an infinite population of possible members of a class of things, actions, and forms of life. Any simple sentence combining words into a coherent utterance then multiplies infinities upon infinities. Discourse inherently reduces multiplicities into texts of limited lengths.

Like any tool, reduction has its uses. Also like any tool, problems arise when the tool is allowed to occupy some hidden and unexamined blind spot from which it can dominate and control the way we think about everything. Critical thinking is most difficult in those instances in which the tools of thinking themselves need to be critically evaluated. To reject reduction uncritically as inherently unjustified is to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Indeed, it is impossible to formulate a statement of the rejection without simultaneously enacting exactly what is supposed to be rejected.

We have numerous ready-to-hand examples of how all reduction has been unjustifiably reduced to one homogenized evil. But one of the results of experiments in communal living in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as of the fall of the Soviet Union, was the realization that the centralized command and control of collectively owned community property cannot compete with the creativity engendered when individuals hold legal title to the fruits of their labors. If individuals cannot own the results of the investments they make, no one makes any investments.

In other words, if everything is owned collectively and is never reduced to individually possessed shares that can be creatively invested for profitable returns, then the system is structured so as to punish innovation and reward doing as little as possible. But there’s another way of thinking about the relation of the collective to the individual. The living soul of capitalism shows itself in the way high quality information makes it possible for markets to efficiently coordinate and align individual producers’ and consumers’ collective behaviors and decisions. What would happen if we could do that for human, social, and natural capital markets? What if “social capitalism” is more than an empty metaphor? What if capital institutions can be configured so that individual profit really does become the driver of socially responsible, sustainable economics?

And here we arrive at the crux of the problem. How do we create the high quality, solid information markets need to punish and reward relative to ethical and sustainable human, social, and environmental values? Well, what can we learn from the way we created that kind of information for property and manufactured capital? These are the questions taken up and explored in the postings in this blog, and in my scientific research publications and meeting presentations. In the near future, I’ll push my reflection on these questions further, and will explore some other possible answers to the questions offered by Greider and his readers in a recent issue of The Nation.