It is not just safe to say—it must be shouted from the rooftops—that without closer attention to measurement, nothing will come of the admirable and essential efforts being made by Project Drawdown as it strives to accelerate the deployment of climate solutions, the development of new leadership, and shifts in the overall conversation from doom and gloom to opportunity and possibility.
It is intensely painful to see well-intentioned, smart, and caring people acting out transparently hollow and ineffective rhetorical moves operationalized in ways that are absolutely guaranteed to fail. Project Drawdown, like virtually every other effort aimed at addressing climate change and sustainable solutions, from the United Nations Agenda 2030 and Sustainable Development Goals (Fisher, et al., 2019; Lips da Cruz, et al., 2019; Fisher & Wilson, 2019) to the Carbon Disclosure Project (Fisher, Melin, & Moller, 2021, 2022), seeks to create sustainable change without ecologizing knowledge infrastructures. Failing to make use of longstanding and highly advantageous principles and methods of measurement and metrology can only lead to disappointing results.
My previous publications on this theme (Fisher, 2009, 2011, 2012a/b, 2020a/b, 2021a/b; 2023; Fisher, et al., 2019, 2021; Lips da Cruz, et al., 2019; etc.) are now joined by a more pointed contrast (Fisher, 2022) of how confusing numbers for quantities must necessarily always result in failed sustainable change efforts.
That is, interpreted in the context of Project Drawdown, the new article asks, in effect,
How dramatically accelerated progress akin to that seen over the course of technological developments made in the last 20, 50, or 200 years could be possible if efficient markets for human, social, and natural capital were created (Fisher, 2009, 2011, 2012a/b, 2020a, 2021b)?
How “science-based priorities for climate action—across sectors, timescales, and geographies” can be set so as “to make more rapid and efficient progress” if no attention is paid to creating meaningful metrics read from instruments deployed in distributed networks and traceable to consensus standard units?
How any reasonable basis for expecting so-called “science-based priorities” to actually make any kind of difference that matters can be substantiated if instruments are not carefully designed to measure higher order sustainability constructs—as opposed to merely tracking physical volumes of carbon and other greenhouse gases?
How any kind of credible plans for “more rapid and efficient progress” can be formulated if the constructs measured are not demonstrated in theory and practice as exhibiting the same properties of structural invariance across sectors, timescales, and geographies?
How systems recognizing that “everyone has a vital part to play in achieving” Project Drawdown’s goals can be created if everyone everywhere is not being connected in global metrology systems that design, calibrate, and distribute tools for custom-tailored, personalized, legally owned, and financially accountable sustainable change measurement and management (Fisher, 2012b)?
How “changemakers—business leaders, investors, philanthropists, development officials, and more” can be informed and supplied “with science-derived strategies to ensure climate solutions scale as quickly and equitably as possible” if systematic approaches to creating metrologically sophisticated participatory social ecologies (Fisher, 2021a; Fisher & Stenner, 2018; Morrison & Fisher, 2018-2023) are not underway?
How universal involvement in making the needed investments and reaping the desired rewards can be facilitated without mapping measured constructs telling individuals, groups, and communities where they stand now in relation to where they were, where they want to be, and what to do next, with clear indications of the exceptions to the rule in need of close attention in every unique local circumstance (Black, et al., 2011; Fisher, 2013; Fisher & Stenner, 2023)?
Moving faster to address the urgent challenges of our time is not primarily a matter of finding and applying the will power and resources needed to do the job. The desire, will, and resources already exist in abundance. As I explain in several previous posts here, what we lack are institutions and systems envisioned, planned, skilled, resourced, and incentivized to harness the power we possess. My new Acta IMEKO article (Fisher, 2022) contrasts the differences between today’s way of imagining and approaching sustainable change, and a new way that shifts the focus to a broader vision informed by an ecologizing approach to devising sociocognitive infrastructures (Fisher, 2021a; Fisher & Stenner, 2018).
If it were easy to communicate how to shift a paradigm, one might have to wonder how truly paradigmatic the proposed change really is. Though it often feels like nothing but screaming into a hurricane, there is really nothing else to do but persist in spelling out these issues the best I can…
References
Black, P., Wilson, M., & Yao, S. (2011). Road maps for learning: A guide to the navigation of learning progressions. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research and Perspectives, 9, 1-52.
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. (2011). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. Journal of Applied Measurement, 12(1), 49-66.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012a). Measure and manage: Intangible assets metric standards for sustainability. In J. Marques, S. Dhiman & S. Holt (Eds.), Business administration education: Changes in management and leadership strategies (pp. 43-63). Palgrave Macmillan.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012b, June 1). What the world needs now: A bold plan for new standards [Third place, 2011 NIST/SES World Standards Day paper competition]. Standards Engineering, 64(3), 1 & 3-5 [http://ssrn.com/abstract=2083975].
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2013). Imagining education tailored to assessment as, for, and of learning: Theory, standards, and quality improvement. Assessment and Learning, 2, 6-22.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2020a). Contextualizing sustainable development metric standards: Imagining new entrepreneurial possibilities. Sustainability, 12(9661), 1-22. https://doi.org/10.3390/su12229661
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2020b). Measuring genuine progress: An example from the UN Millennium Development Goals project. Journal of Applied Measurement, 21(1), 110-133
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2021a). Bateson and Wright on number and quantity: How to not separate thinking from its relational context. Symmetry, 13(1415). https://doi.org/10.3390/sym13081415
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2021b). Separation theorems in econometrics and psychometrics: Rasch, Frisch, two Fishers, and implications for measurement. Journal of Interdisciplinary Economics, 35(1), 29-60. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02601079211033475
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2023). Measurement systems, brilliant results, and brilliant processes in healthcare: Untapped potentials of person-centered outcome metrology for cultivating trust. In W. P. Fisher, Jr. & S. Cano (Eds.), Person-centered outcome metrology: Principles and applications for high stakes decision making (pp. 357-396). Springer.
Fisher, W. P., Jr., Melin, J., & Möller, C. (2022). A preliminary report on metrology for climate-neutral cities. Acta IMEKO, in press.
Fisher, W. P., Jr., Pendrill, L., Lips da Cruz, A., & Felin, A. (2019). Why metrology? Fair dealing and efficient markets for the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1379(012023 [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1379/1/012023]). doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1379/1/012023
Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2018). Ecologizing vs modernizing in measurement and metrology. Journal of Physics Conference Series, 1044(012025), [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1044/1/012025].
Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2023). A technology roadmap for intangible assets metrology. In W. P. Fisher, Jr., and P. J. Massengill, Explanatory models, unit standards, and personalized learning in educational measurement: Selected papers by A. Jackson Stenner (pp. 179-198). Springer. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-3747-7
Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Wilson, M. (2019). The BEAR Assessment System Software as a platform for developing and applying UN SDG metrics. Journal of Physics Conference Series, 1379(012041). https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/1379/1/012041
Lips da Cruz, A., Fisher, W. P. J., Felin, A., & Pendrill, L. (2019). Accelerating the realization of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals through metrological multi-stakeholder interoperability. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1379(012046 [http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1742-6596/1379/1/012046]).
Morrison, J., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2018). Connecting learning opportunities in STEM education: Ecosystem collaborations across schools, museums, libraries, employers, and communities. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1065(022009). doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1065/2/022009
Morrison, J., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2019). Measuring for management in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics learning ecosystems. Journal of Physics: Conference Series, 1379(012042). doi:10.1088/1742-6596/1379/1/012042
Morrison, J., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2021a). Caliper: Measuring success in STEM learning ecosystems. Measurement: Sensors, 18, 100327. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.measen.2021.100327
Morrison, J., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2021b, June 1). Multilevel measurement for business and industrial workforce development. Presented at the Mathematical and Statistical Methods for Metrology. Joint Workshop of ENBIS and MATHMET, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy.
Morrison, J., & Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2022). Caliper: Steps to an ecologized knowledge infrastructure for STEM learning ecosystems in Israel. Acta IMEKO, in press.
Living Capital Metrics LLC, BEAR Center, Graduate School of Education, UC Berkeley, and
the Research Institute of Sweden, Gothenburg
4 January 2021
I. Summary
As was observed by Reginald McGregor in the STEM learning ecosystems Zoom call today preparing for the Biden-Harris Town Hall meetings, past policies addressing equity, quality programming, funding, professional development, after school/school alignment, and other issues in education have not had the desired impacts on outcomes. McGregor then asked, what must we do differently to obtain the results we want and need? In short, what we must do differently is to focus systematically on how to create a viral contagion of trust–not just with each other but with our data and our institutions. Trust depends intrinsically on verifiable facts, personal ownership, and proven productive consequences–and we have a wealth of untapped resources for systematically building trust in mass scalable ways, for creating a social contagion of trust that disseminates the authentic wealth of learning and valued relationships. This proposal describes those resources, where they can be found, who the experts in these areas are, which agencies have historically been involved in developing them, what is being done to put them to work, and how we should proceed from here. Because it will set the tone for everything that follows, and because there is no better time for such a seismic shift in the ground than at the beginning, a clear and decisive statement of what needs to be done differently ought to be a Day One priority for the Biden-Harris administration. Though this memo was initiated in response to the STEM learning ecosystems town hall meetings, its theme is applicable across a wide range of policy domains, and should be read as such.
II. Challenge and Opportunity
What needs to be done differently hinges on the realization that a theme common to all of the issues identified by McGregor concerns the development of trusting relationships. Igniting viral contagions of trust systematically at mass scales requires accomplishing two apparently contradictory goals simultaneously: creating communications and information standards that are both universally transparent and individually personalized. It may appear that these two goals cannot be achieved at the same time, but in actual fact they are integrated in everyday language. The navigable continuity of communications and information standards need not be inconsistent with the unique strengths, weaknesses, and creative improvisations of custom tailored local conversations. Standards do not automatically entail pounding square pegs into round holes.
Transparent communications of meaningful high quality information cultivate trust by inspiring confidence in the repeated veracity and validity of what is said. Capacities for generalizing lessons learned across localities augment that trust and support the spread of innovations. Personalized information applicable to unique individual circumstances cultivates trust as students, teachers, parents, administrators, researchers, employers, and others are each able (a) to recognize their own special uniqueness reflected in information on their learning outcomes, (b) to see the patterns of their learning and growth reflected in that information over time, and (c) to see themselves in others’ information, and others in themselves. Systematic support and encouragement for policies and practices integrating these seemingly contradictory goals would constitute truly new approaches to old problems. Given that longstanding and widespread successes in combining these goals have already been achieved, new hope for resounding impacts becomes viable, feasible, and desirable.
III. Plan of Action
To stop the maddening contradiction of expecting different results from repetitions of the same behaviors, decisive steps must be taken toward making better use of existing models and methods, ones that coherently inform new behaviors leading to new outcomes. We are not speaking here of small incremental gains produced via intensive but microscopically focused efforts. We are raising the possibility that we may be capable of igniting viral contagions of trust. Just as the Arab Spring was in many ways fostered by the availability of new and unfettered technologically mediated social networks like Facebook and Twitter, so, also, will the creation of new outcomes communications platforms in education, healthcare, social services, and environmental resource management unleash powerful social forces. In the same way that smartphones are both incredibly useful for billions of people globally and are also highly technical devices involving complexities beyond the ken of the vast majority of those using them, so, too, do the complex models and methods at issue here have similar potentials for mass scaling.
To efficiently share transferable lessons as to what works, we need the common quantitative languages of outcome measurement standards, where (a) quantities are defined not in the ordinal terms of test scores but in the interval terms of metrologically traceable units with associated uncertainties, and (b) where those quantities are estimated not from just one set of assessment questions or items but from linked collections of diverse arrays of different kinds of self, observational, portfolio, peer, digital, and other assessments (or even from theory). To support individuals’ creative improvisations and unique circumstances, those standards, like the alphabets, grammars, and dictionaries setting the semiotic standards of everyday language, must enable new kinds of qualitative conversations negotiating the specific hurdles of local conditions. Custom tailored individual reports making use of interval unit estimates and uncertainties have been in use globally for decades.
Existing efforts in this area have been underway since the work of Thurstone in the 1920s, Rasch and Wright in the period from the 1950s through the 1990s, and of thousands of others since then. Over the course of the last several decades, the work of these innovators has been incorporated into hundreds of research studies funded by the Institute for Education Sciences, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health. Most of these applications have, however, been hobbled by limited conceptualizations restricting expectations to the narrow terms of statistical hypothesis testing instead of opening onto the far more expansive possibilities offered by an integration of metrological standards and individualized reporting. This is a key way of expressing the crux of the shift proposed here. We are moving away from merely numeric statistical operations conducted via centrally planned and controlled analytic methods, and we are moving toward fully quantitative quality-assured measurement operations conducted via widely distributed and socially self-organized methods.
Because history shows existing institutions rarely successfully alter their founding principles, it is likely necessary for a government agency previously not involved in this work to now take the lead. That agency should be the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). This recommendation is supported by the recent emergence of new alliances of psychometricians and metrologists clarifying the theory and methods needed for integrating the two seemingly opposed goals of comparable standards and custom tailored applications. The International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) of national metrology institutes has provided a forum for reports in this area since 2008, as has, since 2017, the International Metrology Congress, held in Paris. An international meeting bringing together equal numbers of metrologists and psychometricians was held at UC Berkeley in 2016 (NIST’s Antonio Possolo gave a keynote), dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles in this new area have appeared since 2009, two authoritative books have appeared since 2019, and multiple ongoing collaborations internationally focused on the development of new unit standards and traceable instrumentation for education, health care, and other fields are underway.
Important leaders in this area capable of guiding the formation of the measurement-specific policies for research and practice include David Andrich (U Western Australia, Perth), Matt Barney (Leaderamp, Vacaville, CA), Betty Bergstrom (Pearson VUE, Chicago), Stefan Cano (Modus Outcomes, UK), Theo Dawson (Lectica, Northampton, MA), Peter Hagell (U Kristianstad, Sweden), Martin Ho (FDA), Mike Linacre (Winsteps.com), Larry Ludlow (Boston College), Luca Mari (U Cattaneo, Italy), Robert Massof (Johns Hopkins), Andrew Maul (UC Santa Barbara), Jeanette Melin (RISE, Sweden), Janice Morrison (TIES, Cleveland), Leslie Pendrill (RISE, Sweden), Maureen Powers (Gemstone Optometry, Berkeley), Andrea Pusic (Brigham & Women’s, Boston), Matthew Rabbitt (USDA), Thomas Salzberger (U Vienna, Austria), Karen Schmidt (U Virginia), Mark Wilson (UC Berkeley), and many others.
Partnerships across economic sectors are essential to the success of this initiative. Standards provide the media by which different groups of stakeholders can advance their unique interests more effectively in partnership than they can in isolation. Calls for proposals should stress the vital importance of establishing the multidisciplinary functionality of boundary objects residing at the borders between disciplines. Just as has been accomplished for the SI Unit metrological standards in the natural sciences, educators’ needs for comparable but customized information must be aligned with the analogous needs of stakeholders in other domains, such as management, clinical practice, law, accounting, finance, economics, etc. Of the actors in this domain listed above, at this time, the Research Institute of Sweden (RISE) is most energetically engaged in forming the needed cross-disciplinary collaborations.
Though the complexity and cost of such efforts appear almost insurmountable, beginning the process of envisioning how to address the challenges and capitalize on the opportunities is far more realistic and productive than continuing to flounder without direction, as we currently are and have been for decades. Estimates of the cost of creating, maintaining, and improving existing standards come to about 8% of GDP, with returns on investment estimated by NIST to be in the range of about 40% to over 400%, with a mean of about 140%. The levels of investment needed in the new metrological efforts, and the returns to be gained from those investments, will not likely differ significantly from these estimates.
IV. Conclusion
This proposal is important because it offers a truly original response to the question of what needs to be done differently in STEM education and elsewhere to avoid continuing to reproduce the same tired and ineffective results. The originality of the proposal is complemented by the depth at which it taps the historical successes of the natural sciences and the economics of standards: efficient markets for trading on trust in productive ways could lead to viral contagions of caring relationships. The proposal is also supported by the intuitive plausibility of taking natural language as a model for the creation of new common languages for the communication and improvement of learning, healthcare, employment, and other outcomes. As is the case for any authentic paradigm shift, opposition to the proposal is usually rooted in assumptions that existing expertise, methods, and tools are sufficient to the task, even when massive amounts of evidence point to the need for change. Simple, small, and inexpensive projects can be designed as tests of the concept and as means of attracting interest in the paradigm shift. Convening cross-sector groups of collaborators for the purposes of designing and conducting small demonstration projects may be an effective way of beginning. Finally, the potential for creating economically self-sustaining cycles of investments and returns could be an attractive way of incentivizing private sector participation, especially when this is expressed in terms of the alignment of financial wealth with the authentic wealth of trusting relationships.
V. About the author
William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. received his doctorate from the University of Chicago, where he was mentored by Benjamin D. Wright and supported by a Spencer Foundation Dissertation Research Fellowship. He has been on the staff of the BEAR Center in the Graduate School of Education at UC Berkeley since 2011, and has consulted independently via Living Capital Metrics LLC since 2009. In 2020, Dr. Fisher joined the staff of the Research Institute of Sweden as a Senior Research Scientist. Dr. Fisher is recognized for contributions to measurement theory and practice that span the full range from the philosophical to the applied in fields as diverse as special education, mindfulness practice, nursing, rehabilitation, clinical chemistry, metrology, health outcomes, and survey research.
VI. Supporting literature
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Wright, Benjamin D., R. J. Mead, and L. H. Ludlow. KIDMAP: Person-by-Item Interaction Mapping. Tech. Rept. no. MESA Memorandum #29. Chicago: MESA Press [http://www.rasch.org/memo29.pdf], 1980.
Individual investments in, and returns from, shares of various kinds of human, social, and natural capital stocks will be tracked in secure online accounting ledgers, often referred to generically using the Blockchain brand name. A largely unasked and unanswered question is just what kind of data would best be tracked in secure ledgers. To be meaningful, entries in such accounts will have to stand for something real in the world that is represented in a common language interpretable to anyone capable of reading the relevant signs and symbols. Since we are talking about amounts of things that vary, measurement will unavoidably be a factor.
High quality measurement is essential to the manageability and profitability of investments of all kinds, whether in manufactured capital and property, or in literacy, numeracy, mental and physical health, sociability, and environmental quality (human, social, and natural capital). The measurability and manageability of these intangible factors has achieved significant levels of scientific precision and rigor over the last 90 and more years.
This development is of increasing interest to economists and accountants who have long envisioned ways of reinventing capitalism that do not assume the only alternative is some form of socialism or communism (see references listed below). Many of today’s economic problems may follow from capitalism’s incompleteness. More specifically, we may be suffering from the way in which manufactured capital alone has been been brought to life, economically speaking, while human, social, and natural capital have not (Fisher, 2002, 2007, 2009a/b, 2010a/b, 2011a/b, 2012ab, 2014, etc.).
One in particular who speaks directly to an essential issue that must be addressed in creating an economy of authentic wealth and genuine productivity is Paul Hawken (2007, pp. 21-22), who says that Friedrich Hayek foresaw
“a remedy for the basic expression of the totalitarian impulse: ensuring that information and the right to make decisions are co-located. To achieve this, one can either move the information to the decision makers, or move decision making rights to the information. The movement strives to do both. The earth’s problems are everyone’s problems, and what modern technology and the movement can achieve together is to distribute problem solving tools.”
Hayek (1945, 1948, 1988; Frantz & Leeson, 2013) is well known for his focus on a distinction between a mechanical definition of individuals as uniform and homogenous, and a more vital sense of economic “true individuals” as complex and interdependent. To create efficient markets for the production of authentic wealth, we need to figure out how to extend the “true individuals” of manufactured capital markets into new markets for human, social, and natural capital (Fisher, 2014).
The distributed problem solving tools we need to support the decision making of “true” individuals are secure online ledgers accounting for investments in measured amounts of authentic wealth. Efficient markets are functions of individual processes that create wholes greater than their sums. The multiplier effect that makes this possible depends on transparent communication. Words, including number words, have to mean something specific and distinct. This is where the value of systematic measurement and metrology comes to bear. This is why we need an Intangible Assets Metric System.
For as long as economists have been concerned with markets, philosophers have been pointing out that society is an effect of shared symbol systems. In both cases, economists and philosophers are focused on the fact that it is only when people have a common language that an idea, a meme, can go viral, that a market can seem to have a mind of its own, and science can maintain an ever-increasing pace of technical innovation.
Our aim is to create the information that will populate the entries in the secure ledger accounts people use to track and manage their investments in literacy, numeracy, health, social, and natural capital. These entries will be posted right alongside their existing entries for investments in manufactured capital and property, which includes everything from groceries to autos to electronics to homes.
But the new ledger accounts will be different from today’s in important ways. Many current accounting entries are ultimately written off as costs producing untracked and unaccountable returns. We simply spend the money on groceries or school tuition or a doctor visit. The income is logged, and so are the expenses. We can see that, yes, buying groceries is an investment of a kind, since we profit from it by enjoying the processes of cooking, sharing, and eating tasty food, by avoiding hunger, and by sustaining good health.
Investments are tracked in a different way, though. Money is not just spent and kissed goodbye. Instead, investment funds are loaned to or leased by someone else who is expected to be able to increase the value of those funds. There are often no guarantees of an increase, but the invested value is associated with a proportionate share in the total value of the business. As the business grows or fails, so does the investment.
In much the same way, if we had the information available to us, we could track the returns on the investments we make in food, education, or health care. If we track the impacts of our dietary choices, we would be able to see if and when the investments we make result in healthy outcomes. The information brought to bear will have to include systematic advice relevant to one’s age, sex, pre-existing conditions, genetic propensities, etc. Additional information on the returns on one’s investments in a healthy diet should also be made available, as might be found in the expected income or expenses associated with the consequences of what is eaten, and how much of it. Sometimes there will be room for improvement, for example, if the foods we eat are too sugary or fatty, or if we eat too much. Other times, maintaining a healthy, varied diet may be all that is needed to see a consistent positive return on investment.
Public reports will allow us all to learn from one another. The ability to communicate in a common language and to see what has worked for others will enable everyone to experiment with new ways of doing things. People with common food interests or problems, for instance, will be able quickly evaluate the relevance and benefits of other people’s approaches or solutions. Because of the ways in which communication and community go together, it may be reasonable to hope that new levels of innovation, diversity, tolerance, and respect will follow.
Many aspects of work, education and health care are already undergoing transformations that move their processes out of the usual office, school and hospital environments. These changes will be accelerated as distributed network effects take hold in each of these various markets.
It is easy to see how the Internet of things may evolve to be the medium in which we manage relationships of all kinds, from education and school to health and safety to work and career. Secure ledgers immune from hacking will be essential. And an important health factor will be to know how much relationship management is enough, and when it’s time to get out into the world. That balancing factor will be a key aspect of a successful approach to connecting information on authentic wealth with the individual decision makers growing it and living it.
References
Andriessen, D. (2003). Making sense of intellectual capital: Designing a method for the valuation of intangibles. Oxford, England: Butterworth-Heinemann.
Anielski, M. (2007). The economics of happiness: Building genuine wealth. Gabriola, British Columbia: New Society Publishers.
Cadman, D. (1986). Money as if people mattered. In P. Ekins & Staff of The Other Economic Summit (Eds.), The living economy: A new economics in the making (pp. 204-210). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
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Ekins, P. (1992). A four-capital model of wealth creation. In P. Ekins & M. Max-Neef (Eds.), Real-life economics: Understanding wealth creation (pp. 147-155). London: Routledge.
Ekins, P. (1999). Economic growth and environmental sustainability: The prospects for green growth. New York: Routledge.
Ekins, P., Dresner, S., & Dahlstrom, K. (2008, March/April). The four-capital method of sustainable development evaluation. European Environment, 18(2), 63-80.
Ekins, P., Hillman, M., & Hutchison, R. (1992). The Gaia atlas of green economics (Foreword by Robert Heilbroner). New York: Anchor Books.
Ekins, P., & Max-Neef, M. A. (Eds.). (1992). Real-life economics: Understanding wealth creation. London: Routledge.
Ekins, P., & Voituriez, T. (2009). Trade, globalization and sustainability impact assessment: A critical look at methods and outcomes. London, England: Earthscan Publications Ltd.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2002, Spring). “The Mystery of Capital” and the human sciences. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 15(4), 854 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt154j.htm].
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2007, Summer). Living capital metrics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 21(1), 1092-1093 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt211.pdf].
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009a, November). Invariance and traceability for measures of human, social, and natural capital: Theory and application. Measurement, 42(9), 1278-1287.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010a). Measurement, reduced transaction costs, and the ethics of efficient markets for human, social, and natural capital., Bridge to Business Postdoctoral Certification, Freeman School of Business, Tulane University (p. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2340674).
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011a). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. Journal of Applied Measurement, 12(1), 49-66.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011b). Measuring genuine progress by scaling economic indicators to think global & act local: An example from the UN Millennium Development Goals project. LivingCapitalMetrics.com. Retrieved 18 January 2011, from Social Science Research Network: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1739386.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012a). Measure and manage: Intangible assets metric standards for sustainability. In J. Marques, S. Dhiman & S. Holt (Eds.), Business administration education: Changes in management and leadership strategies (pp. 43-63). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012b, May/June). What the world needs now: A bold plan for new standards [Third place, 2011 NIST/SES World Standards Day paper competition]. Standards Engineering, 64(3), 1 & 3-5 [http://ssrn.com/abstract=2083975].
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2014, Autumn). The central theoretical problem of the social sciences. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 28(2), 1464-1466.
Frantz, R., & Leeson, R. (Eds.). (2013). Hayek and behavioral economics. (Archival Insights Into the Evolution of Economics). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Gleeson-White, J. (2015). Six capitals, or can accountants save the planet? Rethinking capitalism for the 21st century. New York: Norton.
Greider, W. (2003). The soul of capitalism: Opening paths to a moral economy. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Griliches, Z. (1994, March). Productivity, R&D, and the data constraint. American Economic Review, 84(1), 1-23.
Grootaert, C. (1998). Social capital: The missing link? (Vol. 3). Social Capital Intiative Working Paper). Washington, D.C.: The World Bank.
Hand, J. R. M., & Lev, B. (Eds.). (2003). Intangible assets: Values, measures, and risks. Oxford Management Readers). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
Hart, S. L. (2005). (2007). Capitalism at the crossroads: Aligning business, earth, and humanity (Foreword by Al Gore) (2nd ed.). Wharton School Publishing.
Hawken, P. (1993). The ecology of commerce: A declaration of sustainability. New York: HarperCollins Publishers.
Hawken, P. (2007). Blessed unrest: How the largest movement in the world came into being and why no one saw it coming. New York: Viking Penguin.
Hayek, F. A. (1945, September). The use of knowledge in society. American Economic Review, 35, 519-530. (Rpt. in Individualism and economic order (pp. 77-91). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.)
Hayek, F. A. (1955). The counter revolution of science. Glencoe, Illinois: Free Press.
Hayek, F. A. (1988). The fatal conceit: The errors of socialism (W. W. Bartley, III, Ed.) (Vol. I). The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Korten, D. (2009). Agenda for a new economy: From phantom wealth to real wealth. San Francisco: Berret-Koehler Publishing.
Krueger, A. B. (Ed.). (2009). Measuring the subjective well-being of nations: National accounts of time use and well-being. National Bureau of Economic Research Conference Reports). Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Swann, G. M. P. (2001). “No Wealth But Life”: When does conventional wealth create Ruskinian wealth. European Research Studies, 4(3-4), 5-18.
Vemuri, A. W., & Costanza, R. (2006, 10 June). The role of human, social, built, and natural capital in explaining life satisfaction at the country level: Toward a National Well-Being Index. Ecological Economics, 58(1), 119-133.
Integrated considerations of the universal and the local, the pure ideal parameters and the messy concrete observations, seem ever more ubiquitous in my reading lately. For instance, Ricoeur (1992, p. 289) takes up the problem of human rights imperfectly realized as a product of Western Europe’s cultural history that has nonetheless been adopted by nearly every country in the world. Ricoeur raises the notion of “universals in context or of potential or inchoate universals” that embody the paradox in which
“on the one hand, one must maintain the universal claim attached to a few values where the universal and the historical intersect, and on the other hand, one must submit this claim to discussion, not on a formal level, but on the level of the convictions incorporated in concrete forms of life.”
I could hardly come up with a better description of Rasch measurement theory and practice myself. Any given Rasch model data analysis provides many times more individual-level qualitative statistics on the concrete, substantive observations than on the global quantitative measures. The whole point of graphical displays of measurement information in kidmaps (Chien, Wang, Wang, & Lin, 2009; Masters, 1994), Wright maps (Wilson, 2011), construct maps and self-scoring forms (Best, 2008; Linacre, 1997), etc. is precisely to integrate concrete events as they happened with the abstract ideal of a shared measurement dimension.
It is such a shame that there are so few people thinking about these issues aware of the practical value of the state of the art in measurement, and who include all of the various implications of multifaceted, multilevel, and multi-uni-dimensional modeling, fit assessment, equating, construct mapping, standard setting, etc. in their critiques.
The problem falls squarely in the domain of recent work on the coproduction of social, scientific, and economic orders (such as Hutchins 2010, 2012; Nersessian, 2012). Systems of standards, from languages to metric units to dollars, prethink the world for us and simplify a lot of complex work. But then we’re stuck at the level of conceptual, social, economic, and scientific complexity implied by those standards, unless we can create new forms of social organization integrating more domains. Those who don’t know anything about the available tools can’t get any analytic traction, those who know about the tools but don’t connect with the practitioners can’t get any applied traction (see Wilson’s Psychometric Society Presidential Address on this; Wilson, 2013), analysts and practitioners who form alliances but fail to include accountants or administrators may lack financial or organizational traction, etc. etc.
There’s a real need to focus on the formation of alliances across domains of practice, building out the implications of Callon’s (1995, p. 58) observation that “”translation networks weave a socionature.” In other words, standards are translated into the languages of different levels and kinds of practice to the extent that people become so thoroughly habituated to them that they succumb to the illusion that the objects of interest are inherently natural in self-evident ways. (My 2014 IOMW talk took this up, though there wasn’t a lot of time for details.)
Those who are studying these networks have come to important insights that set the stage for better measurement and metrology for human, social, and natural capital. For instance, in a study of universalities in medicine, Berg and Timmermans (2000, pp. 55, 56) note:
“In order for a statistical logistics to enhance precise decision making, it has to incorporate imprecision; in order to be universal, it has to carefully select its locales. The parasite cannot be killed off slowly by gradually increasing the scope of the Order. Rather, an Order can thrive only when it nourishes its parasite—so that it can be nourished by it.”
“Paradoxically, then, the increased stability and reach of this network was not due to more (precise) instructions: the protocol’s logistics could thrive only by parasitically drawing upon its own disorder.”
Though Berg and Timmermans show no awareness at all of probabilistic and additive conjoint measurement theory and practice, their description of how a statistical logistics has to work to enhance precise decision making is right on target. This phenomenon of noise-induced order is a kind of social stochastic resonance (Fisher, 1992, 2011b) that provides another direction in which explanations of Rasch measurement’s potential role in establishing new metrological standards (Fisher, 2009, 2011a) have to be taken.
Berg, M., & Timmermans, S. (2000). Order and their others: On the constitution of universalities in medical work. Configurations, 8(1), 31-61.
Best, W. R. (2008). A construct map that Ben Wright would relish. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 22(3), 1169-70 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt223a.htm].
Callon, M. (1995). Four models for the dynamics of science. In S. Jasanoff, G. E. Markle, J. C. Petersen & T. Pinch (Eds.), Handbook of science and technology studies (pp. 29-63). Thousand Oaks, California: Sage Publications.
Chien, T.-W., Wang, W.-C., Wang, H.-Y., & Lin, H.-J. (2009). Online assessment of patients’ views on hospital performances using Rasch model’s KIDMAP diagram. BMC Health Services Research, 9, 135 [10.1186/1472-6963-9-135 or http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2727503/%5D.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (1992, Spring). Stochastic resonance and Rasch measurement. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 5(4), 186-187 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt54k.htm].
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. (2011a). 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. (2011b). Stochastic and historical resonances of the unit in physics and psychometrics. Measurement: Interdisciplinary Research & Perspectives, 9, 46-50.
Hutchins, E. (2010). Cognitive ecology. Topics in Cognitive Science, 2, 705-715.
Hutchins, E. (2012). Concepts in practice as sources of order. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 19, 314-323.
Linacre, J. M. (1997). Instantaneous measurement and diagnosis. Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation State of the Art Reviews, 11(2), 315-324 [http://www.rasch.org/memo60.htm].
Masters, G. N. (1994). KIDMAP – a history. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 8(2), 366 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt82k.htm].
Nersessian, N. J. (2012). Engineering concepts: The interplay between concept formation and modeling practices in bioengineering sciences. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 19, 222-239.
Wilson, M. R. (2011). Some notes on the term: “Wright Map.” Rasch Measurement Transactions, 25(3), 1331 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt253.pdf].
Wilson, M. (2013, April). Seeking a balance between the statistical and scientific elements in psychometrics. Psychometrika, 78(2), 211-236.
So what are the possibilities for growing out green shoots from the seeds and roots of an ethical orientation to keeping the dialogue going? What kinds of fruits might be expected from cultivating a common ground for choosing discourse over violence? What are the consequences for practice of planting this seed in this ground?
The same participant in the conversation earlier this week at Convergence XV who spoke of the peace building processes taking place around the world also described a developmental context for these issues of mutual understanding. The work of Theo Dawson and her colleagues (Dawson, 2002a, 2002b, 2004; Dawson, Fischer, and Stein, 2006) is especially pertinent here. Their comparisons of multiple approaches to cognitive and moral development have provided clear and decisive theory, evidence, and instrumentation concerning the conceptual integrations that take place in the evolution of hierarchical complexity.
Conceptual integrations occur when previously tacit, unexamined, and assumed principles informing a sphere of operations are brought into conscious awareness and are transformed into explicit objects of new operations. Developmentally, this is the process of discovery that takes place from the earliest stages of life, in utero. Organisms of all kinds mature in a process of interaction with their environments. Young children at the “terrible two” stage, for instance, are realizing that anything they can detach from, whether by throwing or by denying (“No!”), is not part of them. Only a few months earlier, the same children will have been fascinated with their fingers and toes, realizing these are parts of their own bodies, often by putting them in their mouths.
There are as many opportunities for conceptual integrations between the ages of 21 to 99 as there are between birth and 21. Developmental differences in perspectives can make for riotously comic situations, and can also lead to conflicts, even when the participants agree on more than they disagree on. And so here we arrive at a position from which we can get a grip on how to integrate convergence and divergence in a common framework that follows from the prior post’s brief description of the ontological method’s three moments of reduction, application, and deconstruction.
Woolley and colleagues (Woolley, et al., 2010; Woolley and Fuchs, 2011) describe a continuum of five field-organizing activities categorizing the types of information needed for effective collective intelligence (Figure 1). Four of these five activities (defining, bounding, opening, and bridging) vary in the convergent versus divergent processes they bring to bear in collective thinking. Defining and bounding are convergent processes that inform judgment and decision making. These activities are especially important in the emergence of a new field or organization, when the object of interest and the methods of recognizing and producing it are in contention. Opening and bridging activities, in contrast, diverge from accepted definitions and transgress boundaries in the creative process of pushing into new areas. Undergirding the continuum as a whole is the fifth activity, grounding, which serves as a theory- and evidence-informed connection to meaningful and useful results.
There are instances in which defining and bounding activities have progressed to the point that the explanatory power of theory enables the calibration of test items from knowledge of the component parts included in those items. The efficiencies and cost reductions gained from computer-based item generation and administration are significant. Research in this area takes a variety of approaches; for more information, see Daniel and Embretson (2010), DeBoeck and Wilson (2004), Stenner, et al. (2013), and others.
The value of clear definitions and boundaries in this context stems in large part from the capacity to identify exceptions that prove (test) the rules, and that then also provide opportunities for opening and bridging. Kuhn (1961, p. 180; 1977, p. 205) noted that
To the extent that measurement and quantitative technique play an especially significant role in scientific discovery, they do so precisely because, by displaying significant anomaly, they tell scientists when and where to look for a new qualitative phenomenon.
Rasch (1960, p. 124) similarly understood that “Once a law has been established within a certain field then the law itself may serve as a tool for deciding whether or not added stimuli and/or objects belong to the original group.” Rasch gives the example of mechanical force applied to various masses with resulting accelerations, introducing idea that one of the instruments might exert magnetic as well as mechanical force, with noticeable effects on steel masses, but not on wooden masses. Rasch suggests that exploration of these anomalies may result in the discovery of other similar instruments that vary in the extent to which they also exert the new force, with the possible consequence of discovering a law of magnetic attraction.
There has been an intense interest in the assessment of divergent inconsistencies in measurement research and practice following in the wake of Rasch’s early work in psychological and social measurement (examples from a very large literature in this area include Karabatsos and Ulrich, 2002, and Smith and Plackner, 2009). Andrich, for instance, makes explicit reference to Kuhn (1961), saying, “…the function of a model for measurement…is to disclose anomalies, not merely to describe data” (Andrich, 2002, p. 352; also see Andrich, 1996, 2004, 2011). Typical software for applying Rasch models (Andrich, et al., 2013; Linacre, 2011, 2013; Wu, et al., 2007) thus accordingly provides many more qualitative numbers evaluating potential anomalies than quantitative measuring numbers. These qualitative numbers (digits that do not stand for something substantive that adds up in a constant unit) include uncertainty and confidence indicators that vary with sample size; mean square and standardized model fit statistics; and principal components analysis factor loadings and eigenvalues.
The opportunities for divergent openings onto new qualitative phenomena provided by data consistency evaluations are complemented in Rasch measurement by a variety of bridging activities. Different instruments intended to measure the same or closely related constructs may often be equated or co-calibrated, so they measure in a common unit (among many publications in this area, see Dawson, 2002a, 2004; Fisher, 1997; Fisher, et al., 1995; Massof and Ahmadian, 2007; Smith and Taylor, 2004). Similarly, the same instrument calibrated on different samples from the same population may exhibit consistent properties across those samples, offering further evidence of a potential for defining a common unit (Fisher, 1999).
Other opening and bridging activities include capacities (a) to drop items or questions from a test or survey, or to add them; (b) to adaptively administer subsets of custom-selected items from a large bank; and (c) to adjust measures for the leniency or severity of judges assigning ratings, all of which can be done, within the limits of the relevant definitions and boundaries, without compromising the unit of comparison. For methodological overviews, see Bond and Fox (2007), Wilson (2005), and others.
The various field-organizing activities spanning the range from convergence to divergence are implicated not only in research on collective thinking, but also in the history and philosophy of science. Galison and colleagues (Galison, 1997, 1999; Galison and Stump, 1996) closely examine positivist and antipositivist perspectives on the unity of science, finding their conclusions inconsistent with the evidence of history. A postpositivist perspective (Galison, 1999, p. 138), in contrast, finds “distinct communities and incommensurable beliefs” between and often within the areas of theory, experiment, and instrument-making. But instead of finding these communities “utterly condemned to passing one another without any possibility of significant interaction,” Galison (1999, p. 138) observes that “two groups can agree on rules of exchange even if they ascribe utterly different significance to the objects being exchanged; they may even disagree on the meaning of the exchange process itself.” In practice, “trading partners can hammer out a local coordination despite vast global differences.”
In accord with Woolley and colleagues’ work on convergent and divergent field-organizing activities, Galison (1999, p. 137) concludes, then, that “science is disunified, and—against our first intuitions—it is precisely the disunification of science that underpins its strength and stability.” Galison (1997, pp. 843-844) concludes with a section entitled “Cables, Bricks, and Metaphysics” in which the postpositivist disunity of science is seen to provide its unexpected coherence from the simultaneously convergent and divergent ways theories, experiments, and instruments interact.
But as Galison recognizes, a metaphor based on the intertwined strands in a cable is too mechanical to support the dynamic processes by which order arises from particular kinds of noise and chaos. Not cited by Galison is a burgeoning literature on the phenomenon of noise-induced order termed stochastic resonance (Andò and Graziani 2000, Benzi, et al., 1981; Dykman and McClintock, 1998; Fisher, 1992, 2011; Hess and Albano, 1998; Repperger and Farris, 2010). Where the metaphor of a cable’s strands breaks down, stochastic resonance provides multiple ways of illustrating how the disorder of finite and partially independent processes can give rise to an otherwise inaccessible order and structure.
Stochastic resonance involves small noisy signals that can be amplified to have very large effects. The noise has to be of a particular kind, and too much of it will drown out rather than amplify the effect. Examples include the interaction of neuronal ensembles in the brain (Chialvo, Lontin, and Müller-Gerking, 1996), speech recognition (Moskowitz and Dickinson, 2002), and perceptual interpretation (Rianni and Simonotto, 1994). Given that Rasch’s models for measurement are stochastic versions of Guttman’s deterministic models (Andrich, 1985), the question has been raised as to how Rasch’s seemingly weaker assumptions could lead to a measurement model that is stronger than Guttman’s (Duncan, 1984, p. 220). Stochastic resonance may provide an essential clue to this puzzle (Fisher, 1992, 2011).
Another description of what might be a manifestation of stochastic resonance akin to that brought up by Galison arises in Berg and Timmermans’ (2000, p. 56) study of the constitution of universalities in a medical network. They note that, “Paradoxically, then, the increased stability and reach of this network was not due to more (precise) instructions: the protocol’s logistics could thrive only by parasitically drawing upon its own disorder.” Much the same has been said about the behaviors of markets (Mandelbrot, 2004), bringing us back to the topic of the day at Convergence XV earlier this week. I’ll have more to say on this issue of universalities constituted via noise-induced order in due course.
References
Andò, B., & Graziani, S. (2000). Stochastic resonance theory and applications. New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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Andrich, D. (2002). Understanding resistance to the data-model relationship in Rasch’s paradigm: A reflection for the next generation. Journal of Applied Measurement, 3(3), 325-359.
Andrich, D. (2004, January). Controversy and the Rasch model: A characteristic of incompatible paradigms? Medical Care, 42(1), I-7–I-16.
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Andrich, D., Lyne, A., Sheridan, B., & Luo, G. (2013). RUMM 2030: Rasch unidimensional models for measurement. Perth, Australia: RUMM Laboratory Pty Ltd [www.rummlab.com.au].
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Berg, M., & Timmermans, S. (2000). Order and their others: On the constitution of universalities in medical work. Configurations, 8(1), 31-61.
Bond, T., & Fox, C. (2007). Applying the Rasch model: Fundamental measurement in the human sciences, 2d edition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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Dawson, T. L. (2004, April). Assessing intellectual development: Three approaches, one sequence. Journal of Adult Development, 11(2), 71-85.
Dawson, T. L., Fischer, K. W., & Stein, Z. (2006). Reconsidering qualitative and quantitative research approaches: A cognitive developmental perspective. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 229-239.
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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.
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.
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.
What can be done to create jobs and revive the economy? There is no simple, easy answer to this question. Creating busywork is nonsense. We need fulfilling occupations that meet the world’s demand for products and services. It is not easy to see how meaningful work can be systematically created on a broad scale. New energy efficiencies may lead to the cultivation of significant job growth, but it may be unwise to put all of our eggs in this one basket.
So how are we to solve this puzzle? What other areas in the economy might be ripe for the introduction of a new technology capable of supporting a wave of new productivity, like computers did in the 1980s, or the Internet in the 1990s? In trying to answer this question, simplicity and elegance are key factors in keeping things at a practical level.
For instance, we know we accomplish more working together as a team than as disconnected individuals. New jobs, especially new kinds of jobs, will have to be created via innovation. Innovation in science and industry is a team sport. So the first order of business in teaming up for job creation is to know the rules of the game. The economic game is played according to the rules of law embodied in property rights, scientific rationality, capital markets, and transportation/communications networks (see William Bernstein’s 2004 book, The Birth of Plenty). When these conditions are met, as they were in Europe and North America at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the stage is set for long term innovation and growth on a broad scale.
The second order of business is to identify areas in the economy that lack one or more of these four conditions, and that could reasonably be expected to benefit from their introduction. Education, health care, social services, and environmental management come immediately to mind. These industries are plagued with seemingly interminable inflationary spirals, which, no doubt, are at least in part caused by the inability of investors to distinguish between high and low performers. Money cannot flow to and reward programs producing superior results in these industries because they lack common product definitions and comparable measures of their results.
The problems these industries are experiencing are not specific to each of them in particular. Rather, the problem is a general one applicable across all industries, not just these. Traditionally, economic thinking focuses on three main forms of capital: land, labor, and manufactured products (including everything from machines, roads, and buildings to food, clothing, and appliances). Cash and credit are often thought of as liquid capital, but their economic value stems entirely from the access they provide to land, labor, and manufactured products.
Economic activity is not really, however, restricted to these three forms of capital. Land is far more than a piece of ground. What are actually at stake are the earth’s regenerative ecosystems, with the resources and services they provide. And labor is far more than a pair of skilled hands; people bring a complex mix of abilities, motivations, and health to bear in their work. Finally, this scheme lacks an essential element: the trust, loyalty, and commitment required for even the smallest economic exchange to take place. Without social capital, all the other forms of capital (human, natural, and manufactured, including property) are worthless. Consistent, sustainable, and socially responsible economic growth requires that all four forms of capital be made accountable in financial spreadsheets and economic models.
The third order of business, then, is to ask if the four conditions laying out the rules for the economic game are met in each of the four capital domains. The table below suggests that all four conditions are fully met only for manufactured products. They are partially met for natural resources, such as minerals, timber, fisheries, etc., but not at all for nature’s air and water purification systems or broader genetic ecosystem services.
Table
Existing Conditions Relevant to Conceiving a New Birth of Plenty, by Capital Domains
Human
Social
Natural
Manufactured
Property rights
No
No
Partial
Yes
Scientific rationality
Partial
Partial
Partial
Yes
Capital markets
Partial
Partial
Partial
Yes
Transportation & communication networks
Partial
Partial
Partial
Yes
That is, no provisions exist for individual ownership of shares in the total available stock of air and water, or of forest, watershed, estuary, and other ecosystem service outcomes. Nor do any individuals have free and clear title to their most personal properties, the intangible abilities, motivations, health, and trust most essential to their economic productivity. Aggregate statistics are indeed commonly used to provide a basis for policy and research in human, social, and natural capital markets, but falsifiable models of individually applicable unit quantities are not widely applied. Scientifically rational measures of our individual stocks of intangible asset value will require extensive use of these falsifiable models in calibrating the relevant instrumentation.
Without such measures, we cannot know how many shares of stock in these forms of capital we own, or what they are worth in dollar terms. We lack these measures, even though decades have passed since researchers first established firm theoretical and practical foundations for them. And more importantly, even when scientifically rational individual measures can be obtained, they are never expressed in terms of a unit standardized for use within a given market’s communications network.
So what are the consequences for teams playing the economic game? High performance teams’ individual decisions and behaviors are harmonized in ways that cannot otherwise be achieved only when unit amounts, prices, and costs are universally comparable and publicly available. This is why standard currencies and exchange rates are so important.
And right here we have an insight into what we can do to create jobs. New jobs are likely going to have to be new kinds of jobs resulting from innovations. As has been detailed at length in recent works such as Surowiecki’s 2004 book, The Wisdom of Crowds, innovation in science and industry depends on standards. Standards are common languages that enable us to multiply our individual cognitive powers into new levels of collective productivity. Weights and measures standards are like monetary currencies; they coordinate the exchange of value in laboratories and businesses in the same way that dollars do in the US economy.
Applying Bernstein’s four conditions for economic growth to intangible assets, we see that a long term program for job creation then requires
legislation establishing human, social, and natural capital property rights, and an Intangible Assets Metrology System;
scientific research into consensus standards for measuring human, social, and natural capital;
venture capital educational and marketing programs; and
distributed information networks and computer applications through which investments in human, social, and natural capital can be tracked and traded in accord with the rule of law governing property rights and in accord with established consensus standards.
Of these four conditions, Bernstein (p. 383) points to property rights as being the most difficult to establish, and the most important for prosperity. Scientific results are widely available in online libraries. Capital can be obtained from investors anywhere. Transportation and communications services are available commercially.
But valid and verifiable means of representing legal title to privately owned property is a problem often not yet solved even for real estate in many Third World and former communist countries (see De Soto’s 2000 book, The Mystery of Capital). Creating systems for knowing the quality and quantity of educational, health care, social, and environmental service outcomes is going to be a very difficult process. It will not be impossible, however, and having the problem identified advances us significantly towards new economic possibilities.
We need leaders able and willing to formulate audacious goals for new economic growth from ideas such as these. We need enlightened visionaries able to see our potentials from a new perspective, and who can reflect our new self-image back at us. When these leaders emerge—and they will, somewhere, somehow—the imaginations of millions of entrepreneurial thinkers and actors will be fired, and new possibilities will unfold.
I just came across something that could be helpful in regaining some forward momentum and expanding the frame of reference for the research on caring in nursing with Jane Sumner (Sumner & Fisher, 2008). We have yet to really work in the failure of Habermas’ hermeneutic objectivism (Kim, 2002; Thompson, 1984) and we haven’t connected what we’ve done with (a) Ricoeur’s (1984, 1985, 1990, 1995) sense of narrative as describing the past en route to prescribing the future (prefiguring, configuring, and refiguring the creation of meaning in discourse) and with (b) Wright’s (1999) sense of learning from past data to efficiently and effectively anticipate new data within a stable inferential frame of reference.
Now I’ve found a recent publication that resonates well with this goal, and includes examples from nursing to boot. Boje and Baskin (2010; see especially pp. 12-17 in the manuscript available at http://peaceaware.com/vita/paper_pdfs/JOCM_Never_Disenchanted.pdf) cite only secondary literature but do a good job of articulating where the field is at conceptually and in tracing the sources of that articulation. So they make no mention of Ricoeur on narrative (1984, 1985, 1990) and on play and the heuristic fiction (1981, pp. 185-187), and they make no mention of Gadamer on play as the most important clue to methodological authenticity (1989, pp. 101-134). It follows that they then also do not make any use of the considerable volume of other available and relevant work on the metaphysics of allure, captivation, enthrallment, rapture, beauty, or eros.
This is all very important because these issues are highly salient markers of the distinction between a modern, Cartesian, and mechanical worldview destructive of enchantment and play, and the amodern, nonCartesian, and organic worldview in tune with enchantment and play. As I have stressed repeatedly in these posts, the way we frame problems is now the primary problem, in opposition to those who think identifying and applying resources, techniques, or will power is the problem. It is essential that we learn to frame problems in a way that begins from requirements of subject-object interdependence instead of from assumptions of subject-object independence. Previous posts here explore in greater detail how we are all captivated by the desire for meaning. Any time we choose negotiation or patient waiting over violence, we express faith in the ultimate value of trusting our words. So though Boje and Baskin do not document this larger context, they still effectively show exactly where and how work in the nonCartesian paradigm of enchantment connects up with what’s going on in organizational change management theory.
The paper’s focus on narrative as facilitating enchantment and disenchantment speaks to our fundamental absorption into the play of language. Enchantment is described on page 2 as involving positive connection with existence, of being enthralled with the wonder of being endowed with natural and cultural gifts. Though not described as such, this hermeneutics of restoration, as Ricoeur (1967) calls it, focuses on the way symbols give rise to thought in an unasked-for assertion of meaningfulness. The structure we see emerge of its own accord across multiple different data sets from tests, surveys, and assessments is an important example of this gift through which previously identified meanings re-assert themselves anew (see my published philosophical work, such as Fisher, 2004). The contrast with disenchantment of course arises as a function of the dead and one-sided modern Cartesian effort aimed at controlling the environment, which effectively eliminates wonder and meaning via a hermeneutics of suspicion.
In accord with the work done to date with Sumner on caring in nursing, the Boje and Baskin paper describes people’s variable willingness to accept disenchantment or demand enchantment (p. 13) in terms that look quite like preconventional and postconventional Kohlbergian stages. A nurse’s need to shift from one dominant narrative form to another is described as very difficult because of the way she had used the one to which she was accustomed to construct her identity as a nurse (p. 15). Bi-directionality between nurses and patients is implied in another example of a narrative shift in a hospital (p. 16). Both identity and bi-directionality are central issues in the research with Sumner.
The paper also touches on the conceptual domain of instrumental realism, as this is developed in the works of Ihde, Latour, Heelan and others (on p. 6; again, without citing them), and emphasizes a nonCartesian subject-object unity and belongingness, which is described at length in Ricoeur’s work. At the bottom of page 7 and top of 8, storytelling is theorized in terms of retrospection, presentness, and a bet on future meaning, which precisely echoes Ricoeur’s (1984, 1985, 1990) sense of narrative refiguration, configuration, and prefiguration. A connection with measurement comes here, in that what we want is to:
“reach beyond the data in hand to what these data might imply about future data, still unmet, but urgent to foresee. The first problem is how to predict values for these future data, which, by the meaning of inference, are necessarily missing. This meaning of missing must include not only the future data to be inferred but also all possible past data that were lost or never collected” (Wright, 1999, p. 76).
Properly understood and implemented (see previous posts in this blog), measurement based in models of individual behavior provides a way to systematically create an atmosphere of emergent enchantment. Having developmentally sound narratives rooted in individual measures on multiple dimensions over time gives us a shared written history that we can all find ourselves in, and that we can then use to project a vision of a shared future that has reasonable expectations for what’s possible.
This mediation of past and future by means of technical instruments is being described in a way (Miller & O’Leary, 2007) that to me (Fisher & Stenner, 2011) denotes a vital distinction not just between the social and natural sciences, but between economically moribund and inflationary industries such as education, health care, and social services, on the one hand, and economically vibrant and deflationary industries such as microprocessors, on the other.
It is here, and I say this out loud for the first time here, even to myself, that I begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel, to see a way that I might find a sense of closure and resolution in the project I took up over 30 years ago. My puzzle has been one of understanding in theory and practice how it is that measurement and mathematical thinking are nothing but refinements of the logic used in everyday conversation. It only occurs to me now that, if we can focus the conversations that we are in ways that balance meaningfulness and precision, that situate each of us as individuals relative to the larger wholes of who we have been and who we might be, that encompasses both the welcoming Socratic midwife and the annoying Socratic gadfly as different facets of the same framework, and that enable us to properly coordinate and align technical projects involving investments in intangible capital, well, then, we’ll be in a position to more productively engage with the challenges of the day.
There won’t be any panacea but there will be a new consensus and a new infrastructure that, however new they may seem, will enact yet again, in a positive way, the truth of the saying, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.” As I’ve repeatedly argued, the changes we need to implement are nothing but extensions of age-old principles into areas in which they have not yet been applied. We should take some satisfaction from this, as what else could possibly work? The originality of the application does not change the fact that it is rooted in appropriating, via a refiguration, to be sure, a model created for other purposes that works in relation to new purposes.
Another way of putting the question is in terms of that “permanent arbitration between technical universalism and the personality constituted on the ethico-political plane” characteristic of the need to enter into the global technical society while still retaining our roots in our cultural past (Ricoeur, 1974, p. 291). What is needed is the capacity to mediate each individual’s retelling of the grand narrative so that each of us sees ourselves in everyone else, and everyone else in ourselves. Though I am sure the meaning of this is less than completely transparent right now, putting it in writing is enormously satisfying, and I will continue to work on telling the tale as it needs to be told.
References
Boje, D., & Baskin, K. (2010). Our organizations were never disenchanted: Enchantment by design narratives vs. enchantment by emergence. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 24(4), 411-426.
Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2004, October). Meaning and method in the social sciences. Human Studies: A Journal for Philosophy and the Social Sciences, 27(4), 429-54.
Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011, August 31 to September 2). A technology roadmap for intangible assets metrology. International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO). Jena, Germany.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1989). Truth and method (J. Weinsheimer & D. G. Marshall, Trans.) (Second revised edition). New York: Crossroad.
Kim, K.-M. (2002, May). On the failure of Habermas’s hermeneutic objectivism. Cultural Studies <–> Critical Methodologies, 2(2), 270-98.
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.
Ricoeur, P. (1967). Conclusion: The symbol gives rise to thought. In R. N. Anshen (Ed.), The symbolism of evil (pp. 347-57). Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1974). Political and social essays (D. Stewart & J. Bien, Eds.). Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1981). Hermeneutics and the human sciences: Essays on language, action and interpretation (J. B. Thompson, Ed.) (J. B. Thompson, Trans.). Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1984, 1985, 1990). Time and Narrative, Vols. 1-3 (K. McLaughlin (Blamey) & D. Pellauer, Trans.). Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press.
Ricoeur, P. (1995). Reply to Peter Kemp. In L. E. Hahn (Ed.), The philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (pp. 395-398). Chicago, Illinois: Open Court.
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.
Thompson, J. B. (1981). Critical hermeneutics: A study in the thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jurgen Habermas. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Wright, B. D. (1999). Fundamental measurement for psychology. In S. E. Embretson & S. L. Hershberger (Eds.), The new rules of measurement: What every educator and psychologist should know (pp. 65-104 [http://www.rasch.org/memo64.htm]). Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
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