Taking the Scales of Justice Seriously as a Model for Sustainable Political Economies

We all take standards of measurement for granted as background assumptions that we never have to think about. But as technical, mundane, and boring as these standards are, they define our systems of fair dealing and just relations (Alder, 2002). The image of blind justice holding a balance scale is a universal ideal that is being compromised in multiple ways by chaotic forces in today’s complicated world arena.

Even so, astoundingly little effort is being invested in systematically exploring how the scales of justice might be more meaningfully and resiliently embedded within our social, economic, educational, health care, and political institutions. This well may be because the idea that people’s abilities, behaviors, and knowledge could be precisely weighed on a scale, like fruit in a grocery store, seems outrageously immoral, opening the door to treating people like commodities to be bought and sold. And even if the political will for such measures could be found, the regulatory enforcement of legally binding contracts and accounting standards appears so implausibly complicated as to make the whole matter not worth any serious consideration at all.

On the face of it, a literal application of the scales of justice to human affairs echoes ideas discredited so thoroughly and for so long that bringing them up in the here and now seems utterly ridiculous, at least, and perhaps truly dangerous, with no possible result except the crushing reduction of human beings to cogs in a soulless machine.

But what if there is some basic way in which measurement is misunderstood when it is taken to mean people will be treated like mass produced commodities for sale? What if we could measure, legally own, invest in, and profit from our literacy, health, and trustworthiness, in the same way we do with property and material things? What if precision measurement was not a tool for oppressive manipulation but a means of obtaining, sharing, and communicating valuable information? Of cultivating trust? What if local contextual situations can be allowed a latitude of variation that does not negatively compromise navigable continuity?

Circumstances are conspiring to take humanity in new directions (Fisher, 2012, 2021, 2023a/b). Complex new necessities are nurturing the conception and birth of new innovations. A wealth of diverse possibilities for adaptive experimentation proposed in the past–sometimes the distant past–are finding new life in today’s technological context. And science has changed a lot in the last 100 years. In fact, the public is largely unaware that the old paradigm of mechanical reduction has been completely demolished and replaced with a new paradigm of organic emergence and complex adaptive systems. Even Newtonian mechanics and the basic number theory of arithmetic have had to be reworked. It is also true that very few experts have thought through what the demise of the mechanical root metaphor, and the birth of an organic ecosystem metaphor, mean philosophically, socially, historically, and culturally.

Bottom-up manifestations of repeating patterns–that can be scaled, measured, quantified, explained, and qualified in individually customized feedback–open up a wide array of new opportunities for learning from shared experiences. And, just as humanity has long understood about music, we know now how to contextualize group and individual assessment and survey response patterns in ways that let everyone be what they are, uniquely improvising playful creative performances expressed using high tech instruments tuned to shared standards. A huge amount of conceptual and practical work needs to be done, but there are multiple historical precedents suggesting that betting against human ingenuity would be a losing wager.

New projects I’m involved in concerning sustainability and metrology begin a new exploration of the consequences of this paradigm shift for our image of the scales of justice as representing a moral imperative. These projects ask whether more complex combinations of mathematics, experiment, technology, and theory can be overtly conceived and implemented in terms of participatory and democratic social and cognitive ecosystems. If so, we may then find our way to new standards of measurement, new languages, and new forms of social organization sufficient to redefining what we take for granted as satisfying our shared sense of fair dealing and just relations.

Reference

Alder, K. (2002). The measure of all things. The Free Press.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012, 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. (2021). 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. (2023a). Foreword: Koans, semiotics, and metrology in Stenner’s approach to

measurement-informed science and commerce. In W. P. Fisher, Jr. & P. J. Massengill (Eds.),

Explanatory models, unit standards, and personalized learning in educational measurement:

Selected papers by A. Jackson Stenner (pp. ix-lxx). Springer Open Access. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-981-19-3747-7

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2023b). 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 Open Access. https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-

031-07465-3

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Making sustainability impacts universally identifiable, individually owned, efficiently exchanged, and profitable

Sustainability impacts plainly and obviously lack common product definitions, objective measures, efficient markets, and associated capacities for competing on improved quality. The absence of these landmarks in the domain of sustainability interests is a result of inattention and cultural biases far more than it is a result of the inherent characteristics or nature of sustainability itself. Given the economic importance of these kinds of capacities and the urgent need for new innovations supporting sustainable development, it is curious how even those most stridently advocating new ways of thinking seem to systematically ignore well-established opportunities for advancing their cause. The wealth of historical examples of rapidly emerging, transformative, disruptive, and highly profitable innovations would seem to motivate massive interest in how extend those successes in new directions.

Economists have long noted how common currencies reduce transaction costs, support property rights, and promote market efficiencies (for references and more information, see previous entries in this blog over the last ten years and more). Language itself is well known for functioning as an economical labor-saving device in the way that useful concepts representing things in the world as words need not be re-invented by everyone for themselves, but can simply be copied. In the same ways that common languages ease communication, and common currencies facilitate trade, so, too, do standards for common product definitions contribute to the creation of markets.

Metrologically traceable measurements make it possible for everyone everywhere to know how much of something in particular there is. This is important, first of all, because things have to be identifiable in shared ways if we are to be able to include them in our lives, socially. Anyone interested in obtaining or producing that kind of thing has to be able to know it and share information about it as something in particular. Common languages capable of communicating specifically what a thing is, and how much of it there is, support claims to ownership and to the fruits of investments in entrepreneurial innovations.

Technologies for precision measurement key to these communications are one of the primary products of science. Instruments measuring in SI units embody common currencies for the exchange of scientific capital. The calibration and distribution of such instruments in the domain of sustainability impact investing and innovation ought to be a top-level priority. How else will sustainable impacts be made universally identifiable, individually owned, efficiently exchanged, and profitable?

The electronics, computer, and telecommunications industries provide ample evidence of precision measurement’s role in reducing transaction costs, establishing common product definitions, and reaping huge profits. The music industry’s use of these technologies combines the science and economics of precision measurement with the artistic creativity of intensive improvisations constructed from instruments tuned to standardized scales that achieve wholly unique levels of individual innovation.

Much stands to be learned, and even more to be gained, in focusing sustainability development on ways in which we can harness the economic power of the profit motive by combining collective efforts with individual imaginations in the domains of human, social, and natural capital. Aligning financial, monetary wealth with the authentic wealth and genuine productivity of gains in human, community, and environmental value ought to be the defining mission of this generation. The time to act is now.

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New Ideas on How to Realize the Purpose of Capital

I’d like to offer the following in reply to James Militzer, at https://nextbillion.net/deciphering-emersons-tears-time-impact-investing-lower-expectations/.

Rapid advances toward impact investing’s highest goals of social transformation are underway in quiet technical work being done in places no one is looking. That work shares Jed Emerson’s sentiments expressed at the 2017 Social Capital Markets conference, as he is quoted in Militzer’s NextBillion.net posting, that “The purpose of capital is to advance a more progressively free and just experience of life for all.” And he is correct in what Militzer reported he said the year before, that we need a “real, profound critique of current practices within financial capitalism,” one that would “require real change in our own behavior aside from adding a few funds to our portfolios here or augmenting a reporting process there.”

But the efforts he and others are making toward fulfilling that purpose and articulating that critique are incomplete, insufficient, and inadequate. Why? How? Language is the crux of the matter, and the issues involved are complex and technical. The challenge, which may initially seem simplistic or naive, is how to bring human, social, and environmental values into words. Not just any words, but meaningful words in a common language. What is most challenging is that this language, like any everyday language, has to span the range from abstract theoretical ideals to concrete local improvisations.

That means it cannot be like our current languages for expressing human, social, and environmental value. If we are going to succeed in aligning those forms of value with financial value, we have a lot of work to do.

Though there is endless talk of metrics for managing sustainable impacts, and though the importance of these metrics for making sustainability manageable is also a topic of infinite discussion, almost no one takes the trouble to seek out and implement the state of the art in measurement science. This is a crucial way, perhaps the most essential way, in which we need to criticize current practices within financial capitalism and change our behaviors. Oddly, almost no one seems to have thought of that.

That is, one of the most universally unexamined assumptions of our culture is that numbers automatically stand for quantities. People who analyze numeric data are called quants, and all numeric data analysis is referred to as quantitative. That is the case, but almost none of these quants and quantitative methods involve actually defining, modeling, identifying, evaluating, or applying an substantive unit of something real in the world that can be meaningfully represented by numbers.

There is, of course, an extensive and longstanding literature on exactly this science of measurement. It has been a topic of research, philosophy, and practical applications for at least 90 years, going back to the work of Thurstone at the University of Chicago in the 1920s. That work continued at the University of Chicago with Rasch’s visit there in 1960, with Wright’s adoption and expansion of Rasch’s theory and methods, and with the further work done by Wright’s students and colleagues in the years since.

Most importantly, over the last ten years, metrologists, the physicists and engineers who maintain and improve the SI units, the metric system, have taken note of what’s been going on in research and practice involving the approaches to measurement developed by Rasch, Wright, and their students and colleagues (for just two of many articles in this area, see here and here). The most recent developments in this new metrology include

(a) initiatives at national metrology institutes globally (Sweden and the UK, Portugal, Ukraine, among others) to investigate potentials for a new class of unit standards;

(b) a special session on this topic at the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) World Congress in Belfast on 5 September 2018;

(c) the Journal of Physics Conference Series proceedings of the 2016 IMEKO Joint Symposium hosted by Mark Wilson and myself at UC Berkeley;

(d) the publication of a 2017 book on Ben Wright edited by Mark Wilson and myself in Springer’s Series on Measurement Science and Technology; and

(e) the forthcoming October 2018 special issue of Elsevier’s Measurement journal edited by Wilson and myself, and a second one currently in development.

There are profound differences between today’s assumptions about measurement and how a meaningful art and science of precision measurement proceeds. What passes for measurement in today’s sustainability economics and accounting are counts, percentages, and ratings. These merely numeric metrics do not stand for anything that adds up the way they do. In fact, it’s been repeatedly demonstrated over many years that these kinds of metrics measure in a unit that changes size depending on who or what is measured, who is measuring, and what tool is used to measure. What makes matters even worse is that the numbers are usually taken to be perfectly precise, as uncertainty ranges, error terms, and confidence intervals are only sporadically provided and are usually omitted.

Measurement is not primarily a matter of data analysis. Measurement requires calibrated instruments that can be read as standing for a given amount of something that stays the same, within the uncertainty range, no matter who is measuring, no matter what or who is measured, and no matter what tool is used. This is, of course, quite an accomplishment when it can be achieved, but it is not impossible and has been put to use in large scale practical ways for several decades (for instance, see here, here, and here). Universally accessible instruments calibrated to common unit standards are what make society in general, and markets in particular, efficient in the way of projecting distributed network effects, turning communities into massively parallel stochastic computers (as W. Brian Arthur put it on p. 6 of his 2014 book, Complexity Economics).

These are not unexamined assumptions or overly ideal theoretical demands. They are pragmatic ways of adapting to emergent patterns in various kinds of data that have repeatedly been showing themselves around the world for decades. Our task is to literally capitalize on these nonhuman forms of life by creating multilevel, complex ecosystems of relationships with them, letting them be what they are in ways that also let us represent ourselves to each other. (Emerson quotes Bruno Latour to this effect on page 136 in his new book, The Purpose of Capital; those familiar with my work will know I’ve been reading and citing Latour since the early 1980s).

So it seems to me that, however well-intentioned those promoting impact investing may be, there is little awareness of just how profound and sweeping the critique of current practices needs to be, or of just how much our own behaviors are going to have to change. There are, however, truly significant reasons to be optimistic and hopeful. The technical work being done in measurement and metrology points toward possibilities for extending everyday language into a pragmatic idealism that does not require caving in to either varying local circumstances or to authoritarian dictates.

The upside of the situation is that, as so often happens in the course of human history, this critique and the associated changes are likely to have that peculiar quality captured in the French expression, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose” (the more things change, the more they stay the same). The changes in process are transformative, but will also be recognizable repetitions of human scale patterns.

In sum, what we are doing is tuning the instruments of the human, social, and environmental sciences to better harmonize relationships. Just as jazz, folk, and world music show that creative improvisation is not constrained by–but is facilitated by–tuning standards and high tech solutions, so, too, can we make that the case in other areas.

For instance, in my presentation at the IMEKO World Congress in Belfast on 5 September, I showed that the integration of beauty and meaning we have within our grasp reiterates principles that date back to Plato. The aesthetics complement the mathematics, with variations on the same equations being traceable from the Pythagorean theorem to Newton’s laws to Rasch’s models for measurement (see, for instance, Fisher & Stenner, 2013). In many ways, the history of science and philosophy continues to be a footnote to Plato.

LivingCapitalMetrics Blog by William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at livingcapitalmetrics.wordpress.com.
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Current events in metrology for fun, profitable, and self-sustaining sustainability impacts

At the main event I attended last week at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco, the #giveyouthachance philanthropic gathering at the Aquarium of the Bay, multiple people independently spoke to aligning social and environmental values with financial values, and explicitly stated that economic growth does not automatically entail environmental degradation.

As my new buddy David Traub (introduced as a consequence of the New Algorithm event in Stockholm in June with Angelica Lips da Cruz) was the MC, he put me on the program at the last minute, and gave me five minutes to speak my piece in a room of 30 people or so. A great point of departure was opened up when Carin Winter of MissionBe.org spoke to her work in mindfulness education and led a guided meditation. So I conveyed the fact that the effects of mindfulness practice are rigorously measurable, and followed that up with the analogy from music (tuning instruments to harmonize relationships),  with the argument against merely shouldering the burden of costs because it is the right thing to do, with the counter-argument for creating efficient competitive markets for sustainable impacts, and with info on the previous week’s special session on social and psychological metrology at IMEKO in Belfast. It appeared that the message of metrology as a means for making sustainability self-sustaining, fun, and profitable got through!

Next up: Unify.Earth has developed their own new iteration on blockchain, which will be announced Monday, 24 September, at the UN SDG Media Center (also see here) during the World Economic Forum’s Sustainable Development Impact Summit. The UEX (Unify Earth Exchange) fills the gap for human capital stocks left by the Universal Commons‘ exclusive focus on social and natural capital.

So I’ve decided to go to NY and have booked my travel.

Back in February, Angelica Lips da Cruz recounted saying six months before that it would take two years to get to where we were at that time. Now another seven months have passed and I am starting to feel that the acceleration is approaching Mach 1! At this rate, it’ll be the speed of light in the next six months….

LivingCapitalMetrics Blog by William P. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D. is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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Self-Sustaining Sustainability

After decades of efforts and massive resources expended in trying to create a self-sustaining sustainable economy, perhaps it is time to wonder if we are going about it the wrong way. There seems to be truly significant and widespread desire for change, but the often inspiring volumes of investments and ingenuity applied to the problem persistently prove insufficient to the task. Why?

I’ve previously and repeatedly explained how finding the will to change is not the issue. This time I’ll approach my proposed solution in a different way.

Q: How do we create a self-sustaining sustainable economy?

A: By making sustainability profitable in monetary terms as well as in the substantive real terms of the relationships we live out with each other and the earth. Current efforts in this regard focus solely on reducing energy costs enough to compensate for investments in advancing the organizational mission. We need far more comprehensively designed solutions than that.

Q: How do we do that?

A: By financially rewarding improved sustainability at every level of innovation, from the individual to the community to the firm.

Q: How do we do that?

A: By instituting rights to the ownership of human, social, and natural capital properties, and by matching the demand for sustainability with the supply of it in a way that will inform arbitrage and pricing.

Q: How do we do that?

A: By lowering the cost of the information needed to be able to know how many shares of human, social, and natural capital stocks are owned, and to match demand with supply.

Q: How could that be done?

A: By investing as a society in improving the quality and distribution of the available information.

Q: What does that take?

A: Creating dependable and meaningful tools for ascertaining the quantity, quality, and type of sustainability impacts on human, social, and natural capital being offered.

Q: Can that be done?

A: The technical art and science of measurement needed for creating these tools is well established, having been in development for almost 100 years.

Q: How do we start?

A: An important lesson of history is that building the infrastructure and its array of applications follows in the wake of, and cannot precede, the institution of the constitutional ideals. We must know what the infrastructure and applications will look like in their general features, but nothing will ever be done if we think we have to have them in place before instantiating the general frame of reference. The most general right to own legal title to human, social, and natural capital can be instituted, and the legal status of new metric system units can be established, before efforts are put into unit standards, traceability processes, protocols for intralaboratory ruggedness tests and interlaboratory round robin trials, conformity assessments, etc.

Q: It sounds like an iterative process.

A: Yes, one that must attend from the start to the fundamental issues of information coherence and complexity, as is laid out in my recent work with Emily Oon, Spencer Benson, Jack Stenner, and others.

Q: This sounds highly technical, utilitarian, and efficient. But all the talk of infrastructure, standards, science, and laboratories sounds excessively technological. Is there any place in this scheme for ecological values, ethics, and aesthetics? And how are risk and uncertainty dealt with?

A: We can take up each of these in turn.

Ecological values: To use an organic metaphor, we know the DNA of the various human, social, and natural capital forms of life, or species, and we know their reproductive and life cycles, and their ecosystem requirements. What we have not done is to partner with each of these species in relationships that focus on maximizing the quality of their habitats, their maturation, and the growth of their populations. Social, psychological, and environmental relationships are best conceived as ecosystems of mutual interdependencies. Being able to separate and balance within-individual, between-individual, and collective levels of complexity in these interdependencies will be essential to the kinds of steward leadership needed for creating and maintaining new sociocognitive ecosystems. Our goal here is to become the change we want to institute, since caterpillar to butterfly metamorphoses come about only via transformations from within.

Ethics: The motivating intention is to care simultaneously and equally effectively for both individual uniqueness and global humanity. In accord with the most fundamental ethical decision, we choose discourse over violence, and we do so by taking language as the model for how things come into words. Language is itself alive in the sense of the collective processes by which new meanings come into it. Language moreover has the remarkable capacity of supporting local concrete improvisations and creativity at the same time that it provides navigable continuity and formal ideals. Care for the unity and sameness of meaning demands a combination of rigorous conceptual determinations embodied in well-defined words with practical applications of those words in local improvisations. That is how we support the need to make decisions with inevitably incomplete and inconsistent information while not committing the violence of the premature conclusion. The challenge is one of finding a balance between openness and boundaries that allows language and our organizational cultures to be stable while also evolving. Our technical grasp of complex adaptive systems, autopoiesis, and stochastic measurement information models is advanced enough to meet these ethical requirements of caring for ourselves, each other, and the earth.

Aesthetics: An aesthetic desire for and love of beauty roots the various forms of life inhabiting diverse niches in the proposed knowledge ecosystem and information infrastructure, and does so in the ground of the ethical choice of discourse and meaning over violence. The experience of beauty teaches us how to understand meaning. The attraction to beauty is a unique human phenomenon because it combines apparent opposites into a single complex feeling. Even when the object of desire is possessed as fully as possible, desire is not eliminated, and even when one feels the object of desire to be lost or completely out of touch, its presence and reality is still felt. So, too, with meaning: no actual instance of anything in the world ever embodies the fullness of an abstract conceptual ideal. This lesson of beauty is perhaps most plainly conveyed in music, where artists deliberately violate the standards of instrument tuning to create fascinating and absorbing combinations of harmony and dissonance from endlessly diverse ensembles. Some tunings persist beyond specific compositions to become immediately identifiable trademark sounds. In taking language as a model, the aesthetic combination of desire and possession informs the ethics of care for the unity and sameness of meaning, and vice versa. And ecological values, ethics, and aesthetics stand on par with the technical concerns of calibration and measurement.

Risk and uncertainty: Calibrating a tool relative to a unit standard is by itself already a big step toward reducing uncertainty and risk. Instead of the chaos of dozens of disconnected sustainability indicators, or the cacophony of hundreds or thousands of different tests, assessments, or surveys measuring the same things, we will have data and theory supporting interpretation of reproducible patterns. These patterns will be, and in many cases already are, embodied in instruments that further reduce risk by defining an invariant unit of comparison, simplifying interpretation, reducing opportunities for mistakes, by quantifying uncertainty, and by qualifying it in terms of the anomalous exceptions that depart from expectations. Each of these is a special feature of rigorously defined measurement that will eventually become the expected norm for information on sustainability.

For more on these themes, see my other blog posts here, my various publications, and my SSRN page.

 

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What is the point of sustainability impact investing?

What if the sustainability impact investing problem is not just a matter of judiciously supporting business policies and practices likely to enhance the long term viability of life on earth? What if the sustainability impact investing problem is better conceived in terms of how to create markets that function as self-sustaining ecosystems of diverse forms of economic life?

The crux of the sustainability problem from this living capital metrics point of view is how to create efficient markets for virtuous cycles of productive value creation in the domains of human, social, and natural capital. Mainstream economics deems this an impossible task because its definition of measurement makes trade in these forms of capital unethical and immoral forms of slavery.

But what if there is another approach to measurement? What if this alternative approach is scientific in ways unimagined in mainstream economics? What if this alternative approach has been developing in research and practice in education, psychology, health care, sociology, and other fields for over 90 years? What if there are thousands of peer-reviewed publications supporting its validity and reliability? What if a wide range of commercial firms have been successfully employing this alternative approach to measurement for decades? What if this alternative approach has been found legally and scientifically defensible in ways other approaches have not? What if this alternative approach enables us to be better stewards of our lives together than is otherwise possible?

Put another way, measuring and managing sustainability is fundamentally a problem of harmonizing relationships. What do we need to harmonize our relationships with each other, between our communities and nations, and with the earth? How can we achieve harmonization without forcing conformity to one particular scale? How can we tune the instruments of a sustainability art and science to support as wide a range of diverse ensembles and harmonies as exists in music?

Positive and hopeful answers to these questions follow from the fact that we have at our disposal a longstanding, proven, and advanced art and science of qualitatively rich measurement and instrument calibration. The crux of the message is that this art and science is poised to be the medium in which sustainability impact investing and management fulfills its potential and transforms humanity’s capacities to care for itself and the earth.

The differences between the quality of information that is available, and the quality of information currently in use in sustainability impact investing, are of such huge magnitudes that they can only be called transformative. Love and care are the power behind these transformative differences. Choosing discourse over violence, considerateness for the vulnerabilities we share with others, and care for the unity and sameness of meaning in dialogue are all essential to learning the lesson Diotima taught Socrates in Plato’s Symposium. These lessons can all be brought to bear in creating the information and communications systems we need for sustainable economies.

The current world of sustainability impact investing’s so-called metrics lead to widespread complaints of increased administrative and technical burdens, and resulting distractions that lead away from pursuit of the core social mission. The maxim, “you manage what you measure,” becomes a cynical commentary on red tape and bureaucracy instead of a commendable use of tools fit for purpose.

In contrast with the cumbersome and uninterpretable masses of data that pass for sustainability metrics today, the art and science of measurement establishes the viability and feasibility of efficient markets for human, social, and natural capital. Instead of counting paper clips in mindless accounting exercises, we can instead be learning what comes next in the formative development of a student, a patient, an employee, a firm, a community, or the ecosystem services of watersheds, forests, and fisheries.

And we can moreover support success in those developments by means of information flows that indicate where the biggest per-dollar human, social, and natural capital value returns accrue. Rigorous measurability of those returns will make it possible to price them, to own them, to make property rights legally enforceable, and to thereby align financial profits with the creation of social value. In fact, we could and should set things up so that it will be impossible to financially profit without creating social value. When that kind of system of incentives and rewards is instituted, then the self-sustaining virtuous cycle of a new ecological economy will come to life.

Though the value and originality of the innovations making this new medium possible are huge, in the end there’s really nothing new under the sun. As the French say, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.” Or, as Whitehead put it, philosophically, the innovations in measurement taking hold in the world today are nothing more than additional footnotes to Plato. Contrary to both popular and most expert opinion, it turns out that not only is a moral and scientific art of human measurement possible, Plato’s lessons on how experiences of beauty teach us about meaning provide what may well turn out to be the only way today’s problems of human suffering, social discontent, and environmental degradation will be successfully addressed.

We are faced with a kind of Chinese finger-puzzle: the more we struggle, the more trapped we become. Relaxing into the problem and seeing the historical roots of scientific reasoning in everyday thinking opens our eyes to a new path. Originality is primarily a matter of finding a useful model no one else has considered. A long history of innovations come together to point in a new direction plainly recognizable as a variation on an old theme.

Instead of a modern focus on data and evidence, then, and instead of the postmodern focus on the theory-dependence of data, we are free to take an unmodern focus on how things come into language. The chaotic complexity of that process becomes manageable as we learn to go with the flow of adaptive evolving processes stable enough to support meaningful communication. Information infrastructures in this linguistic context are conceived as ecosystems alive to changeable local situations at the same time they do not compromise continuity and navigability.

We all learn through what we already know, so it is essential that we begin from where we are at. Our first lessons will then be drawn from existing sustainability impact data, using the UN SDG 17 as a guide. These data were not designed from the principles of scientifically rigorous measurement, but instead assume that separately aggregated counts of events, percentages, and physical measures of volume, mass, or time will suffice as measures of sustainability. Things that are easy to count are not, however, likely to work as satisfactory measures. We need to learn from the available data to think again about what data are necessary and sufficient to the task.

The lessons we will learn from the data available today will lead to more meaningful and rigorous measures of sustainability. Connecting these instruments together by making them metrologically traceable to standard units, while also illuminating local unique data patterns, in widely accessible multilevel information infrastructures is the way in which we will together work the ground, plant the seeds, and cultivate new diverse natural settings for innovating sustainable relationships.

 

Measuring Instruments as Media for the Expression of Creative Passions in Education

Measurement is often viewed as a reduction of complex phenomena to numbers. It is accordingly also often conceived as mechanical, and disconnected from the world of life. Educational examinations are seen by many as an especially egregious form of inappropriate reduction. This perspective is contradicted, however, by a perspective that sees an analogy between educational assessment and music. Calibrated instruments, mathematical scales, and high technology play key roles in the production of music, which, ironically, is widely considered the most alive, captivating and emotionally powerful of the arts. Though behavioral psychology has indeed learned how to use music to manipulate consumer purchasing decisions, music is unabashedly accepted nonetheless as the highest expression of passion in art.

The question then arises as to if and how measurement in other areas, such as in education, might be conceived, designed, and practiced as a medium for the expression and fulfillment of creative passions. Key issues involved in substantively realizing a musical metaphor in human and social measurement include capacities to tune instruments, to define common scales, to score performances, to orchestrate harmonious relationships, to enhance choral grace note effects, and to combine elements in unique but pleasing and recognizable rhythmic arrangements.

Practical methods for making educational measurement the medium for the expression of creative passions for learning are in place in thousands of schools nationally and internationally. With such tools in hand, formative applications of integrated instruction and assessment could be conceived as intuitive media for composing and conducting expressions of creative passions. Student outcomes in reading, mathematics, and other domains may then come to be seen in terms of portfolios of works akin to those produced by musicians, sculptors, film makers, or painters.

Hundreds of thousands of books and millions of articles tuned to the same text complexity scale, for instance, provide readers an extensive palette of colorful tones and timbres for expressing their desires and capacities for learning. Graphical presentations of individual students’ outcomes, as well as outcomes aggregated by classroom, school, district, etc., could be presented, interpreted and experienced as public performances of artful developmental narratives enabling dramatic performances of personal uniqueness and social generality.

Measurement instrumentation in education is able to capture, aggregate, and organize literacy, numeracy, socio-emotional intelligence, and other performances into special portfolios documenting the play and dance of emerging new understandings. As in any creative process, accidents, errors, and idiosyncratic patterns of strengths and weaknesses may evoke powerful and dramatic expressions of beauty, and human and social value. And just as members of musical ensembles may complement one another’s skills, using rhythm and harmony to improve each others’ playing abilities in practice, so, too, instruments of formative assessment tuned to the same scale can be used to coordinate and enhance individual student and teacher skill levels.

Possibilities for orchestrating such performances across educational, health care, social service, environmental management, and other fields could similarly take advantage of existing instrument calibration and measurement technologies.

Measurement as a Medium for the Expression of Creative Passions in Education

Measurement is often viewed as a purely technical task involving a reduction of complex phenomena to numbers. It is accordingly also experienced as mechanical in nature, and disconnected from the world of life. Educational examinations are often seen as an especially egregious form of inappropriate reduction.

This perspective on measurement is contradicted, however, by the essential roles of calibrated instrumentation, mathematical scales, and high technology in the production of music, which, ironically, is widely considered the most alive, captivating and emotionally powerful of the arts.

The question then arises as to if and how measurement in other areas, such as in education, might be conceived, designed, and practiced as a medium for the expression and fulfillment of creative passions. Key issues involved in substantively realizing a musical metaphor in human and social measurement include capacities to tune instruments, to define common scales, to orchestrate harmonious relationships, to enhance choral grace note effects, and to combine elements in unique but pleasing and recognizable forms.

Practical methods of this kind are in place in hundreds of schools nationally and internationally. With such tools in hand, formative applications of integrated instruction and assessment could be conceived as intuitive media for composing and conducting expressions of creative passions.

Student outcomes in reading, mathematics, and other domains may then come to be seen in terms of portfolios of works akin to those produced by musicians, sculptors, film makers, or painters. Hundreds of thousands of books and millions of articles tuned to the same text complexity scale provide readers an extensive palette of colorful tones and timbres for expressing their desires and capacities for learning. Graphical presentations of individual students’ outcomes, as well as outcomes aggregated by classroom, school, district, etc., may be interpreted and experienced as public performances of artful developmental narratives enabling dramatic performances of personal uniqueness and social generality.

Technical canvases capture, aggregate, and organize literacy performances into special portfolios documenting the play and dance of emerging new understandings. As in any creative process, accidents, errors, and idiosyncratic patterns of strengths and weaknesses may evoke powerful expressions of beauty, and human and social value. Just as members of musical ensembles may complement one another’s skills, using rhythm and harmony to improve each others’ playing abilities in practice, so, too, instruments of formative assessment tuned to the same scale can be used to enhance individual teacher skill levels.

Possibilities for orchestrating such performances across educational, health care, social service, environmental management, and other fields could similarly take advantage of existing instrument calibration and measurement technologies.

Creatively Expressing How Love Matters for Justice: Setting the Stage and Tuning the Instruments

Nussbaum (2013) argues about the political importance of connecting with our bodies without shame and disgust, and of the relevance musical and poetic public expressions of varieties of love offer to conceptions of justice. Institutions embodying principles of loving justice require media integrating emotional expression with technical calculation, in exactly the same way music does. Being able to dance at the revolution demands instruments tuned to shared scales, no matter if equal temperament, just intonation, meantone tuning, or any of a variety of other well, or irregular, temperaments are chosen.

The physicality of dancing, so often evoking romance and courtship, provides a point of entry to a metaphoric logic of reproduction applicable to the Socratic midwifery of ideas and to the products of social intercourse. Tuning the instruments of the human, social, and environmental arts and sciences to harmonize and choreograph relationships may then enable formulation of nonreductionist approaches to the problem of how to reconcile political emotions with physical or geometrical accounts of the scales of justice.

Historical accounts of (musical, medical, electrical, etc.) metrological standards describe ways in which passionate concern for shared vulnerabilities and common joys have sometimes succeeded in deploying systems realizing higher forms of just relations (Alder, 2002; Berg and Timmermans, 2000;  Isacoff, 2001; Schaffer, 1992). The question of the day is whether we will succeed in creating yet new forms of such relations in the many areas of life where they are needed.

Yes, as Nussbaum (2013, p. 396) admits, the demand for love is a tall order, and unrealistic. But all heuristic fictions, from Pythagorean triangles to the mathematical pendulum, are unrealistic and are never actually observed in practice, as has been pointed out by a number of historians and philosophers (Butterfield 1957, pp. 16-17; Heidegger, 1967, p. 89; Rasch, 1960, pp. 37-38, 1973/2011). These fictions are, however, eminently useful as guides, goals, and as coherent ways of telling our stories, and that is the criterion by which they should be judged.

 

Alder, K. (2002). The measure of all things: The seven-year odyssey and hidden error that transformed the world. New York: The Free Press.

Berg, M., & Timmermans, S. (2000). Order and their others: On the constitution of universalities in medical work. Configurations, 8(1), 31-61.

Butterfield, H. (1957). The origins of modern science (revised edition). New York: The Free Press.

Heidegger, M. (1967). What is a thing? (W. B. Barton, Jr. & V. Deutsch, Trans.). South Bend, Indiana: Regnery/Gateway.

Isacoff, S. M. (2001). Temperament: The idea that solved music’s greatest riddle. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Nussbaum, M. (2013). Political emotions: Why love matters for justice. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

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

Rasch, G. (1973/2011, Spring). All statistical models are wrong! Comments on a paper presented by Per Martin-Löf, at the Conference on Foundational Questions in Statistical Inference, Aarhus, Denmark, May 7-12, 1973. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 24(4), 1309 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt244.pdf].

Schaffer, S. (1992). Late Victorian metrology and its instrumentation: A manufactory of Ohms. In R. Bud & S. E. Cozzens (Eds.), Invisible connections: Instruments, institutions, and science (pp. 23-56). Bellingham, WA: SPIE Optical Engineering Press.

Subjectivity, Objectivity, Performance Measurement and Markets

Though he attributes his insight to a colleague (George Baker), Michael Jensen has once more succinctly stated a key point I’ve repeatedly tried to convey in my blog posts. As Jensen (2003, p. 397) puts it,

…any activity whose performance can be perfectly measured objectively does not belong inside the firm. If its performance can be adequately measured objectively it can be spun out of the firm and contracted for in a market transaction.

YES!! Though nothing is measured perfectly, my message has been a series of variations on precisely this theme. Well-measured property, services, products, and commodities in today’s economy are associated with scientific, legal and financial structures and processes that endow certain representations with meaningful indications of kind, amount, value and ownership. It is further well established that the ownership of the products of one’s creative endeavors is essential to economic advancement and the enlargement of the greater good. Markets could not exist without objective measures, and thus we have the central commercial importance of metric standards.

The improved measurement of service outcomes and performances is going to create an environment capable of supporting similar legal and financial indications of value and ownership. Many of the causes of today’s economic crises can be traced to poor quality information and inadequate measures of human, social, and natural value. Bringing publicly verifiable scientific data and methods to bear on the tuning of instruments for measuring these forms of value will make their harmonization much simpler than it ever could be otherwise. Social and environmental costs and value have been relegated to the marginal status of externalities because they have not been measured in ways that made it possible to bring them onto the books and into the models.

But the stage is being set for significant changes. Decades of research calibrating objective measures of a wide variety of performances and outcomes are inexorably leading to the creation of an intangible assets metric system (Fisher, 2009a, 2009b, 2011). Meaningful and rigorous individual-level universally available uniform metrics for each significant intangible asset (abilities, health, trustworthiness, etc.) will

(a) make it possible for each of us to take full possession, ownership, and management control of our investments in and returns from these forms of capital,

(b) coordinate the decisions and behaviors of consumers, researchers, and quality improvement specialists to better match supply and demand, and thereby

(c) increase the efficiency of human, social, and natural capital markets, harnessing the profit motive for the removal of wasted human potential, lost community coherence, and destroyed environmental quality.

Jensen’s observation emerges in his analysis of performance measures as one of three factors in defining the incentives and payoffs for a linear compensation plan (the other two being the intercept and the slope of the bonus line relating salary and bonus to the performance measure targets). The two sentences quoted above occur in this broader context, where Jensen (2003, pp. 396-397) states that,

…we must decide how much subjectivity will be involved in each performance measure. In considering this we must recognize that every performance measurement system in a firm must involve an important amount of subjectivity. The reason, as my colleague George Baker has pointed out, is that any activity whose performance can be perfectly measured objectively does not belong inside the firm. If its performance can be adequately measured objectively it can be spun out of the firm and contracted for in a market transaction. Thus, one of the most important jobs of managers, complementing objective measures of performance with managerial subjective evaluation of subtle interdependencies and other factors is exactly what most managers would like to avoid. Indeed, it is this factor along with efficient risk bearing that is at the heart of what gives managers and firms an advantage over markets.

Jensen is here referring implicitly to the point Coase (1990) makes regarding the nature of the firm. A firm can be seen as a specialized market, one in which methods, insights, and systems not generally available elsewhere are employed for competitive advantage. Products are brought to market competitively by being endowed with value not otherwise available. Maximizing that value is essential to the viability of the firm.

Given conflicting incentives and the mixed messages of the balanced scorecard, managers have plenty of opportunities for creatively avoiding the difficult task of maximizing the value of the firm. Jensen (2001) shows that attending to the “managerial subjective evaluation of subtle interdependencies” is made impossibly complex when decisions and behaviors are pulled in different directions by each stakeholder’s particular interests. Other research shows that even traditional capital structures are plagued by the mismeasurement of leverage, distress costs, tax shields, and the speed with which individual firms adjust their capital needs relative to leverage targets (Graham & Leary, 2010). The objective measurement of intangible assets surely seems impossibly complex to those familiar with these problems.

But perhaps the problems associated with measuring traditional capital structures are not so different from those encountered in the domain of intangible assets. In both cases, a particular kind of unjustified self-assurance seems always to attend the mere availability of numeric data. To the unpracticed eye, numbers seem to always behave the same way, no matter if they are rigorous measures of physical commodities, like kilowatts, barrels, or bushels, or if they are currency units in an accounting spreadsheet, or if they are percentages of agreeable responses to a survey question. The problem is that, when interrogated in particular ways with respect to the question of how much of something is supposedly measured, these different kinds of numbers give quite markedly different kinds of answers.

The challenge we face is one of determining what kind of answers we want to the questions we have to ask. Presumably, we want to ask questions and get answers pertinent to obtaining the information we need to manage life creatively, meaningfully, effectively and efficiently. It may be useful then, as a kind of thought experiment, to make a bold leap and imagine a scenario in which relevant questions are answered with integrity, accountability, and transparency.

What will happen when the specialized expertise of human resource professionals is supplanted by a market in which meaningful and comparable measures of the hireability, retainability, productivity, and promotability of every candidate and employee are readily available? If Baker and Jensen have it right, perhaps firms will no longer have employees. This is not to say that no one will work for pay. Instead, firms will contract with individual workers at going market rates, and workers will undoubtedly be well aware of the market value of their available shares of their intangible assets.

A similar consequence follows for the social safety net and a host of other control, regulatory, and policing mechanisms. But we will no longer be stuck with blind faith in the invisible hand and market efficiency, following the faith of those willing to place their trust and their futures in the hands of mechanisms they only vaguely understand and cannot control. Instead, aggregate effects on individuals, communities, and the environment will be tracked in publicly available and critically examined measures, just as stocks, bonds, and commodities are tracked now.

Previous posts in this blog explore the economic possibilities that follow from having empirically substantiated, theoretically predictable, and instrumentally mediated measures embodying broad consensus standards. What we will have for human, social, and natural capital will be the same kind of objective measures that have made markets work as well as they have thus far. It will be a whole new ball game when profits become tied to human, social, and environmental outcomes.

References

Coase, R. (1990). The firm, the market, and the law. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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. (2009b). NIST Critical national need idea White Paper: metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (Tech. Rep. No. http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com/images/FisherNISTWhitePaper2.pdf). New Orleans: LivingCapitalMetrics.com.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2010, 22 November). Meaningfulness, measurement, value seeking, and the corporate objective function: An introduction to new possibilities. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1713467.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2011). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. Journal of Applied Measurement, 12(1), in press.

Graham, J. R., & Leary, M. T. (2010, 21 December). A review of empirical capital structure research and directions for the future. Available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=1729388.

Jensen, M. C. (2001, Fall). Value maximization, stakeholder theory, and the corporate objective function. Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 14(3), 8-21.

Jensen, M. C. (2003). Paying people to lie: The truth about the budgeting process. European Financial Management, 9(3), 379-406.

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