Excerpts and Notes from Goldberg’s “Billions of Drops…”

Goldberg, S. H. (2009). Billions of drops in millions of buckets: Why philanthropy doesn’t advance social progress. New York: Wiley.

p. 8:
Transaction costs: “…nonprofit financial markets are highly disorganized, with considerable duplication of effort, resource diversion, and processes that ‘take a fair amount of time to review grant applications and to make funding decisions’ [citing Harvard Business School Case No. 9-391-096, p. 7, Note on Starting a Nonprofit Venture, 11 Sept 1992]. It would be a major understatement to describe the resulting capital market as inefficient.”

A McKinsey study found that nonprofits spend 2.5 to 12 times more raising capital than for-profits do. When administrative costs are factored in, nonprofits spend 5.5 to 21.5 times more.

For-profit and nonprofit funding efforts contrasted on pages 8 and 9.

p. 10:
Balanced scorecard rating criteria

p. 11:
“Even at double-digit annual growth rates, it will take many years for social entrepreneurs and their funders to address even 10% of the populations in need.”

p. 12:
Exhibit 1.5 shows that the percentages of various needs served by leading social enterprises are barely drops in the respective buckets; they range from 0.07% to 3.30%.

pp. 14-16:
Nonprofit funding is not tied to performance. Even when a nonprofit makes the effort to show measured improvement in impact, it does little or nothing to change their funding picture. It appears that there is some kind of funding ceiling implicitly imposed by funders, since nonprofit growth and success seems to persuade capital sources that their work there is done. Mediocre and low performing nonprofits seem to be able to continue drawing funds indefinitely from sympathetic donors who don’t require evidence of effective use of their money.

p. 34:
“…meaningful reductions in poverty, illiteracy, violence, and hopelessness will require a fundamental restructuring of nonprofit capital markets. Such a restructuring would need to make it much easier for philanthropists of all stripes–large and small, public and private, institutional and individual–to fund nonprofit organizations that maximize social impact.”

p. 54:
Exhibit 2.3 is a chart showing that fewer people rose from poverty, and more remained in it or fell deeper into it, in the period of 1988-98 compared with 1969-1979.

pp. 70-71:
Kotter’s (1996) change cycle.

p. 75:
McKinsey’s seven elements of nonprofit capacity and capacity assessment grid.

pp. 94-95:
Exhibits 3.1 and 3.2 contrast the way financial markets reward for-profit performance with the way nonprofit markets reward fund raising efforts.

Financial markets
1. Market aggregates and disseminates standardized data
2. Analysts publish rigorous research reports
3. Investors proactively search for strong performers
4. Investors penalize weak performers
5. Market promotes performance
6. Strong performers grow

Nonprofit markets
1. Social performance is difficult to measure
2. NPOs don’t have resources or expertise to report results
3. Investors can’t get reliable or standardized results data
4. Strong and weak NPOs spend 40 to 60% of time fundraising
5. Market promotes fundraising
6. Investors can’t fund performance; NPOs can’t scale

p. 95:
“…nonprofits can’t possibly raise enough money to achieve transformative social impact within the constraints of the existing fundraising system. I submit that significant social progress cannot be achieved without what I’m going to call ‘third-stage funding,’ that is, funding that doesn’t suffer from disabling fragmentation. The existing nonprofit capital market is not capable of [p. 97] providing third-stage funding. Such funding can arise only when investors are sufficiently well informed to make big bets at understandable and manageable levels of risk. Existing nonprofit capital markets neither provide investors with the kinds of information needed–actionable information about nonprofit performance–nor provide the kinds of intermediation–active oversight by knowledgeable professionals–needed to mitigate risk. Absent third-stage funding, nonprofit capital will remain irreducibly fragmented, preventing the marshaling of resources that nonprofit organizations need to make meaningful and enduring progress against $100 million problems.”

pp. 99-114:
Text and diagrams on innovation, market adoption, transformative impact.

p. 140:
Exhibit 4.2: Capital distribution of nonprofits, highlighting mid-caps

pages 192-3 make the case for the difference between a regular market and the current state of philanthropic, social capital markets.

p. 192:
“So financial markets provide information investors can use to compare alternative investment opportunities based on their performance, and they provide a dynamic mechanism for moving money away from weak performers and toward strong performers. Just as water seeks its own level, markets continuously recalibrate prices until they achieve a roughly optimal equilibrium at which most companies receive the ‘right’ amount of investment. In this way, good companies thrive and bad ones improve or die.
“The social sector should work the same way. .. But philanthropic capital doesn’t flow toward effective nonprofits and away from ineffective nonprofits for a simple reason: contributors can’t tell the difference between the two. That is, philanthropists just don’t [p. 193] know what various nonprofits actually accomplish. Instead, they only know what nonprofits are trying to accomplish, and they only know that based on what the nonprofits themselves tell them.”

p. 193:
“The signs that the lack of social progress is linked to capital market dysfunctions are unmistakable: fundraising remains the number-one [p. 194] challenge of the sector despite the fact that nonprofit leaders divert some 40 to 60% of their time from productive work to chasing after money; donations raised are almost always too small, too short, and too restricted to enhance productive capacity; most mid-caps are ensnared in the ‘social entrepreneur’s trap’ of focusing on today and neglecting tomorrow; and so on. So any meaningful progress we could make in the direction of helping the nonprofit capital market allocate funds as effectively as the private capital market does could translate into tremendous advances in extending social and economic opportunity.
“Indeed, enhancing nonprofit capital allocation is likely to improve people’s lives much more than, say, further increasing the total amount of donations. Why? Because capital allocation has a multiplier effect.”

“If we want to materially improve the performance and increase the impact of the nonprofit sector, we need to understand what’s preventing [p. 195] it from doing a better job of allocating philanthropic capital. And figuring out why nonprofit capital markets don’t work very well requires us to understand why the financial markets do such a better job.”

p. 197:
“When all is said and done, securities prices are nothing more than convenient approximations that market participants accept as a way of simplifying their economic interactions, with a full understanding that market prices are useful even when they are way off the mark, as they so often are. In fact, that’s the whole point of markets: to aggregate the imperfect and incomplete knowledge held by vast numbers of traders about much various securities are worth and still make allocation choices that are better than we could without markets.
“Philanthropists face precisely the same problem: how to make better use of limited information to maximize output, in this case, social impact. Considering the dearth of useful tools available to donors today, the solution doesn’t have to be perfect or even all that good, at least at first. It just needs to improve the status quo and get better over time.
“Much of the solution, I believe, lies in finding useful adaptations of market mechanisms that will mitigate the effects of the same lack of reliable and comprehensive information about social sector performance. I would even go so far as to say that social enterprises can’t hope to realize their ‘one day, all children’ visions without a funding allociation system that acts more like a market.
“We can, and indeed do, make incremental improvements in nonprofit funding without market mechanisms. But without markets, I don’t see how we can fix the fragmentation problem or produce transformative social impact, such as ensuring that every child in America has a good education. The problems we face are too big and have too many moving parts to ignore the self-organizing dynamics of market economics. As Thomas Friedman said about the need to impose a carbon tax at a time of falling oil prices, ‘I’ve wracked my brain trying to think of ways to retool America around clean-power technologies without a price signal–i.e., a tax–and there are no effective ones.”

p. 199:
“Prices enable financial markets to work the way nonprofit capital markets should–by sending informative signals about the most effective organizations so that money will flow to them naturally..”

p. 200:
[Quotes Kurtzman citing De Soto on the mystery of capital. Also see p. 209, below.]
“‘Solve the mystery of capital and you solve many seemingly intractable problems along with it.'”
[That’s from page 69 in Kurtzman, 2002.]

p. 201:
[Goldberg says he’s quoting Daniel Yankelovich here, but the footnote does not appear to have anything to do with this quote:]
“‘The first step is to measure what can easily be measured. The second is to disregard what can’t be measured, or give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can’t be measured easily isn’t very important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can’t be easily measured really doesn’t exist. This is suicide.'”

Goldberg gives example here of $10,000 invested witha a 10% increase in value, compared with $10,000 put into a nonprofit. “But if the nonprofit makes good use of the money and, let’s say, brings the reading scores of 10 elementary school students up from below grade level to grade level, we can’t say how much my initial investment is ‘worth’ now. I could make the argument that the value has increased because the students have received a demonstrated educational benefit that is valuable to them. Since that’s the reason I made the donation, the achievement of higher scores must have value to me, as well.”

p. 202:
Goldberg wonders whether donations to nonprofits would be better conceived as purchases than investments.

p. 207:
Goldberg quotes Jon Gertner from the March 9, 2008, issue of the New York Times Magazine devoted to philanthropy:

“‘Why shouldn’t the world’s smartest capitalists be able to figure out more effective ways to give out money now? And why shouldn’t they want to make sure their philanthropy has significant social impact? If they can measure impact, couldn’t they get past the resistance that [Warren] Buffet highlighted and finally separate what works from what doesn’t?'”

p. 208:
“Once we abandon the false notions that financial markets are precision instruments for measuring unambiguous phenomena, and that the business and nonproft sectors are based in mutually exclusive principles of value, we can deconstruct the true nature of the problems we need to address and adapt market-like mechanisms that are suited to the particulars of the social sector.
“All of this is a long way (okay, a very long way) of saying that even ordinal rankings of nonprofit investments can have tremendous value in choosing among competing donation opportunities, especially when the choices are so numerous and varied. If I’m a social investor, I’d really like to know which nonprofits are likely to produce ‘more’ impact and which ones are likely to produce ‘less.'”

“It isn’t necessary to replicate the complex working of the modern stock markets to fashion an intelligent and useful nonprofit capital allocation mechanism. All we’re looking for is some kind of functional indication that would (1) isolate promising nonprofit investments from among the confusing swarm of too many seemingly worthy social-purpose organizations and (2) roughly differentiate among them based on the likelihood of ‘more’ or ‘less’ impact. This is what I meant earlier by increasing [p. 209] signals and decreasing noise.”

p. 209:
Goldberg apparently didn’t read De Soto, as he says that the mystery of capital is posed by Kurtzman and says it is solved via the collective intelligence and wisdom of crowds. This completely misses the point of the crucial value that transparent representations of structural invariance hold in market functionality. Goldberg is apparently offering a loose kind of market for which there is an aggregate index of stocks for nonprofits that are built up from their various ordinal performance measures. I think I find a better way in my work, building more closely from De Soto (Fisher, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2007, 2009a, 2009b).

p. 231:
Goldberg quotes Harvard’s Allen Grossman (1999) on the cost-benefit boundaries of more effective nonprofit capital allocation:

“‘Is there a significant downside risk in restructuring some portion of the philanthropic capital markets to test the effectiveness of performance driven philanthropy? The short answer is, ‘No.’ The current reality is that most broad-based solutions to social problems have eluded the conventional and fragmented approaches to philanthropy. It is hard to imagine that experiments to change the system to a more performance driven and rational market would negatively impact the effectiveness of the current funding flows–and could have dramatic upside potential.'”

p. 232:
Quotes Douglas Hubbard’s How to Measure Anything book that Stenner endorsed, and Linacre and I didn’t.

p. 233:
Cites Stevens on the four levels of measurement and uses it to justify his position concerning ordinal rankings, recognizing that “we can’t add or subtract ordinals.”

pp. 233-5:
Justifies ordinal measures via example of Google’s PageRank algorithm. [I could connect from here using Mary Garner’s (2009) comparison of PageRank with Rasch.]

p. 236:
Goldberg tries to justify the use of ordinal measures by citing their widespread use in social science and health care. He conveniently ignores the fact that virtually all of the same problems and criticisms that apply to philanthropic capital markets also apply in these areas. In not grasping the fundamental value of De Soto’s concept of transferable and transparent representations, and in knowing nothing of Rasch measurement, he was unable to properly evaluate to potential of ordinal data’s role in the formation of philanthropic capital markets. Ordinal measures aren’t just not good enough, they represent a dangerous diversion of resources that will be put into systems that take on lives of their own, creating a new layer of dysfunctional relationships that will be hard to overcome.

p. 261 [Goldberg shows here his complete ignorance about measurement. He is apparently totally unaware of the work that is in fact most relevant to his cause, going back to Thurstone in 1920s, Rasch in the 1950s-1970s, and Wright in the 1960s to 2000. Both of the problems he identifies have long since been solved in theory and in practice in a wide range of domains in education, psychology, health care, etc.]:
“Having first studied performance evaluation some 30 years ago, I feel confident in saying that all the foundational work has been done. There won’t be a ‘eureka!’ breakthrough where someone finally figures out the one true way to guage nonprofit effectiveness.
“Indeed, I would venture to say that we know virtually everything there is to know about measuring the performance of nonprofit organizations with only two exceptions: (1) How can we compare nonprofits with different missions or approaches, and (2) how can we make actionable performance assessments common practice for growth-ready mid-caps and readily available to all prospective donors?”

p. 263:
“Why would a social entrepreneur divert limited resources to impact assessment if there were no prospects it would increase funding? How could an investor who wanted to maximize the impact of her giving possibly put more golden eggs in fewer impact-producing baskets if she had no way to distinguish one basket from another? The result: there’s no performance data to attract growth capital, and there’s no growth capital to induce performance measurement. Until we fix that Catch-22, performance evaluation will not become an integral part of social enterprise.”

pp. 264-5:
Long quotation from Ken Berger at Charity Navigator on their ongoing efforts at developing an outcome measurement system. [wpf, 8 Nov 2009: I read the passage quoted by Goldberg in Berger’s blog when it came out and have been watching and waiting ever since for the new system. wpf, 8 Feb 2012: The new system has been online for some time but still does not include anything on impacts or outcomes. It has expanded from a sole focus on financials to also include accountability and transparency. But it does not yet address Goldberg’s concerns as there still is no way to tell what works from what doesn’t.]

p. 265:
“The failure of the social sector to coordinate independent assets and create a whole that exceeds the sum of its parts results from an absence of.. platform leadership’: ‘the ability of a company to drive innovation around a particular platform technology at the broad industry level.’ The object is to multiply value by working together: ‘the more people who use the platform products, the more incentives there are for complement producers to introduce more complementary products, causing a virtuous cycle.'” [Quotes here from Cusumano & Gawer (2002). The concept of platform leadership speaks directly to the system of issues raised by Miller & O’Leary (2007) that must be addressed to form effective HSN capital markets.]

p. 266:
“…the nonprofit sector has a great deal of both money and innovation, but too little available information about too many organizations. The result is capital fragmentation that squelches growth. None of the stakeholders has enough horsepower on its own to impose order on this chaos, but some kind of realignment could release all of that pent-up potential energy. While command-and-control authority is neither feasible nor desirable, the conditions are ripe for platform leadership.”

“It is doubtful that the IMPEX could amass all of the resources internally needed to build and grow a virtual nonprofit stock market that could connect large numbers of growth-capital investors with large numbers of [p. 267] growth-ready mid-caps. But it might be able to convene a powerful coalition of complementary actors that could achieve a critical mass of support for performance-based philanthropy. The challenge would be to develop an organization focused on filling the gaps rather than encroaching on the turf of established firms whose participation and innovation would be required to build a platform for nurturing growth of social enterprise..”

p. 268-9:
Intermediated nonprofit capital market shifts fundraising burden from grantees to intermediaries.

p. 271:
“The surging growth of national donor-advised funds, which simplify and reduce the transaction costs of methodical giving, exemplifies the kind of financial innovation that is poised to leverage market-based investment guidance.” [President of Schwab Charitable quoted as wanting to make charitable giving information- and results-driven.]

p. 272:
Rating agencies and organizations: Charity Navigator, Guidestar, Wise Giving Alliance.
Online donor rankings: GlobalGiving, GreatNonprofits, SocialMarkets
Evaluation consultants: Mathematica

Google’s mission statement: “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

p. 273:
Exhibit 9.4 Impact Index Whole Product
Image of stakeholders circling IMPEX:
Trading engine
Listed nonprofits
Data producers and aggregators
Trading community
Researchers and analysts
Investors and advisors
Government and business supporters

p. 275:
“That’s the starting point for replication [of social innovations that work]: finding and funding; matching money with performance.”

[WPF bottom line: Because Goldberg misses De Soto’s point about transparent representations resolving the mystery of capital, he is unable to see his way toward making the nonprofit capital markets function more like financial capital markets, with the difference being the focus on the growth of human, social, and natural capital. Though Goldberg intuits good points about the wisdom of crowds, he doesn’t know enough about the flaws of ordinal measurement relative to interval measurement, or about the relatively easy access to interval measures that can be had, to do the job.]

References

Cusumano, M. A., & Gawer, A. (2002, Spring). The elements of platform leadership. MIT Sloan Management Review, 43(3), 58.

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

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. (2003). Measurement and communities of inquiry. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 17(3), 936-8 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt173.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2005). Daredevil barnstorming to the tipping point: New aspirations for the human sciences. Journal of Applied Measurement, 6(3), 173-9 [http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com/images/FisherJAM05.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2007, Summer). Living capital metrics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 21(1), 1092-3 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt211.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009a). Bringing human, social, and natural capital to life: Practical consequences and opportunities. In M. Wilson, K. Draney, N. Brown & B. Duckor (Eds.), Advances in Rasch Measurement, Vol. Two (p. in press [http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com/images/BringingHSN_FisherARMII.pdf]). Maple Grove, MN: JAM Press.

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

Garner, M. (2009, Autumn). Google’s PageRank algorithm and the Rasch measurement model. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 23(2), 1201-2 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt232.pdf].

Grossman, A. (1999). Philanthropic social capital markets: Performance driven philanthropy (Social Enterprise Series 12 No. 00-002). Harvard Business School Working Paper.

Kotter, J. (1996). Leading change. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard Business School Press.

Kurtzman, J. (2002). How the markets really work. New York: Crown Business.

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.

Comments on the New ANSI Human Capital Investor Metrics Standard

The full text of the proposed standard is available here.

It’s good to see a document emerge in this area, especially one with such a broad base of support from a diverse range of stakeholders. As is stated in the standard, the metrics defined in it are a good place to start and in many instances will likely improve the quality and quantity of the information made available to investors.

There are several issues to keep in mind as the value of standards for human capital metrics becomes more widely appreciated. First, in the context of a comprehensively defined investment framework, human capital is just one of the four major forms of capital, the other three being social, natural, and manufactured (Ekins, 1992; Ekins, Dresden, and Dahlstrom, 2008). To ensure as far as possible the long term stability and sustainability of their profits, and of the economic system as a whole, investors will certainly want to expand the range of the available standards to include social and natural capital along with human capital.

Second, though we manage what we measure, investment management is seriously compromised by having high quality scientific measurement standards only for manufactured capital (length, weight, volume, temperature, energy, time, kilowatts, etc.). Over 80 years of research on ability tests, surveys, rating scales, and assessments has reached a place from which it is prepared to revolutionize the management of intangible forms of capital (Fisher, 2007, 2009a, 2009b, 2010, 2011a, 2011b; Fisher & Stenner, 2011a, 2011b; Wilson, 2011; Wright, 1999). The very large reductions in transaction costs effected by standardized metrics in the economy at large (Barzel, 1982; Benham and Benham, 2000) are likely to have a similarly profound effect on the economics of human, social, and natural capital (Fisher, 2011a, 2012a, 2012b).

The potential for dramatic change in the conceptualization of metrics is most evident in the proposed standard in the sections on leadership quality and employee engagement. For instance, in the section on leadership quality, it is stated that “Investors will be able to directly compare all organizations that are using the same vendor’s methodology.” This kind of dependency should not be allowed to stand as a significant factor in a measurement standard. Properly constructed and validated scientific measures, such as those that have been in wide use in education, psychology and health care for several decades (Andrich, 2010; Bezruzcko, 2005; Bond and Fox, 2007; Fisher and Wright, 1994; Rasch, 1960; Salzberger, 2009; Wright, 1999), are equated to a common unit. Comparability should never depend on which vendor is used. Rather, any instrument that actually measures the construct of interest (leadership quality or employee engagement) should do so in a common unit and within an acceptable range of error. “Normalizing” measures for comparability, as is suggested in the standard, means employing psychometric methods that are 50 years out of date and that are far less rigorous and practical than need be. Transparency in measurement means looking through the instrument to the thing itself. If particular instruments color or reshape what is measured, or merely change the meaning of the numbers reported, then the integrity of the standard as a standard should be re-examined.

Third, for investments in human capital to be effectively managed, each distinct aspect of it (motivations, skills and abilities, health) needs to be measured separately, just as height, weight, and temperature are. New technologies have already transformed measurement practices in ways that make the necessary processes precise and inexpensive. Of special interest are adaptively administered precalibrated instruments supporting mass customized—but globally comparable—measures (for instance, see the examples at http://blog.lexile.com/tag/oasis/ and that were presented at the recent Pearson Global Research Conference in Fremantle, Australia http://www.pearson.com.au/marketing/corporate/pearson_global/default.html; also see Wright and Bell 1984, Lunz, Bergstrom, and Gershon, 1994, Bejar, et al., 2003).

Fourth, the ownership of human capital needs clarification and legal status. If we consider each individual to own their abilities, health, and motivations, and to be solely responsible for decisions made concerning the disposition of those properties, then, in accord with their proven measured amounts of each type of human capital, everyone ought to have legal title to a specific number of shares or credits of each type. This may transform employment away from wage-based job classification compensation to an individualized investment-based continuous quality improvement platform. The same kind of legal titling system will, of course, need to be worked out for social and natural capital, as well.

Fifth, given scientific standards for each major form of capital, practical measurement technologies, and legal title to our shares of capital, we will need expanded financial accounting standards and tools for managing our individual and collective investments. Ongoing research and debates concerning these standards and tools (Siegel and Borgia, 2006; Young and Williams, 2010) have yet to connect with the larger scientific, economic, and legal issues raised here, but developments in this direction should be emerging in due course.

Sixth, a number of lingering moral, ethical and political questions are cast in a new light in this context. The significance of individual behaviors and decisions is informed and largely determined by the context of the culture and institutions in which those behaviors and decisions are executed. Many of the morally despicable but not illegal investment decisions leading to the recent economic downturn put individuals in the position of either setting themselves apart and threatening their careers or doing what was best for their portfolios within the limits of the law. Current efforts intended to devise new regulatory constraints are misguided in focusing on ever more microscopically defined particulars. What is needed is instead a system in which profits are contingent on the growth of human, social, and natural capital. In that framework, legal but ultimately unfair practices would drive down social capital stock values, counterbalancing ill-gotten gains and making them unprofitable.

Seventh, the International Vocabulary of Measurement, now in its third edition (VIM3), is a standard recognized by all eight international standards accrediting bodies (BIPM, etc.). The VIM3 (http://www.bipm.org/en/publications/guides/vim.html) and forthcoming VIM4 are intended to provide a uniform set of concepts and terms for all fields that employ measures across the natural and social sciences. A new dialogue on these issues has commenced in the context of the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO), whose member organizations are the weights and standards measurement institutes from countries around the world (Conference note, 2011). The 2012 President of the Psychometric Society, Mark Wilson, gave an invited address at the September 2011 IMEKO meeting (Wilson, 2011), and a member of the VIM3 editorial board, Luca Mari, is invited to speak at the July, 2012 International Meeting of the Psychometric Society. I encourage all interested parties to become involved in efforts of these kinds in their own fields.

References

Andrich, D. (2010). Sufficiency and conditional estimation of person parameters in the polytomous Rasch model. Psychometrika, 75(2), 292-308.

Barzel, Y. (1982). Measurement costs and the organization of markets. Journal of Law and Economics, 25, 27-48.

Bejar, I., Lawless, R. R., Morley, M. E., Wagner, M. E., Bennett, R. E., & Revuelta, J. (2003, November). A feasibility study of on-the-fly item generation in adaptive testing. The Journal of Technology, Learning, and Assessment, 2(3), 1-29; http://ejournals.bc.edu/ojs/index.php/jtla/article/view/1663.

Benham, A., & Benham, L. (2000). Measuring the costs of exchange. In C. Ménard (Ed.), Institutions, contracts and organizations: Perspectives from new institutional economics (pp. 367-375). Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar.

Bezruczko, N. (Ed.). (2005). Rasch measurement in health sciences. Maple Grove, MN: JAM Press.

Bond, T., & Fox, C. (2007). Applying the Rasch model: Fundamental measurement in the human sciences, 2d edition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Conference note. (2011). IMEKO Symposium: August 31- September 2, 2011, Jena, Germany. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 25(1), 1318.

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., Dresner, S., & Dahlstrom, K. (2008). The four-capital method of sustainable development evaluation. European Environment, 18(2), 63-80.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2007). Living capital metrics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 21(1), 1092-3 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt211.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2009a). 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 (http://www.nist.gov/tip/wp/pswp/upload/202_metrological_infrastructure_for_human_social_natural.pdf). Washington, DC: National Institute for Standards and Technology.

Fisher, W. P.. Jr. (2010). Rasch, Maxwell’s method of analogy, and the Chicago tradition. In G. Cooper (Chair), https://conference.cbs.dk/index.php/rasch/Rasch2010/paper/view/824. Probabilistic models for measurement in education, psychology, social science and health: Celebrating 50 years since the publication of Rasch’s Probabilistic Models.., University of Copenhagen School of Business, FUHU Conference Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark.

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). Measurement, metrology and the coordination of sociotechnical networks. In  S. Bercea (Chair), New Education and Training Methods. International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO), http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24491/ilm1-2011imeko-017.pdf, Jena, Germany.

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

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2012b). What the world needs now: A bold plan for new standards. Standards Engineering, 64, in press.

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

Fisher, W. P., Jr., & Stenner, A. J. (2011b). A technology roadmap for intangible assets metrology. In Fundamentals of measurement science. International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) TC1-TC7-TC13 Joint Symposium, http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24493/ilm1-2011imeko-018.pdf, Jena, Germany.

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

Lunz, M. E., Bergstrom, B. A., & Gershon, R. C. (1994). Computer adaptive testing. International Journal of Educational Research, 21(6), 623-634.

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.

Salzberger, T. (2009). Measurement in marketing research: An alternative framework. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Siegel, P., & Borgia, C. (2006). The measurement and recognition of intangible assets. Journal of Business and Public Affairs, 1(1).

Wilson, M. (2011). The role of mathematical models in measurement: A perspective from psychometrics. In L. Mari (Chair), Plenary lecture. International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO), http://www.db-thueringen.de/servlets/DerivateServlet/Derivate-24178/ilm1-2011imeko-005.pdf, Jena, Germany.

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.

Wright, B. D., & Bell, S. R. (1984, Winter). Item banks: What, why, how. Journal of Educational Measurement, 21(4), 331-345 [http://www.rasch.org/memo43.htm].

Young, J. J., & Williams, P. F. (2010, August). Sorting and comparing: Standard-setting and “ethical” categories. Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 21(6), 509-521.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

Science, Public Goods, and the Monetization of Commodities

Though I haven’t read Philip Mirowski’s new book yet (Science-Mart: Privatizing American Science. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), a statement in the cover blurb given at Amazon.com got me thinking. I can’t help but wonder if there is another way of interpreting neoliberal ideology’s “radically different view of knowledge and discovery: [that] the fruits of scientific investigation are not a public good that should be freely available to all, but are commodities that could be monetized”?

Corporations and governments are not the only ones investing in research and new product development, and they are not the only ones who could benefit from the monetization of the fruits of scientific investigation. Individuals make these investments as well, and despite ostensible rights to private ownership, no individuals anywhere have access to universally comparable, uniformly expressed, and scientifically valid information on the quantity or quality of the literacy, health, community, or natural capital that is rightfully theirs. They accordingly also then do not have any form of demonstrable legal title to these properties. In the same way that corporations have successfully advanced their economic interests by seeing that patent and intellectual property laws were greatly strengthened, so, too, ought individuals and communities advance their economic interests by, first, expanding the scope of weights and measures standards to include intangible assets, and second, by strengthening laws related to the ownership of privately held stocks of living capital.

The nationalist and corporatist socialization of research will continue only as long as social capital, human capital, and natural capital are not represented in the universally uniform common currencies and transparent media that could be provided by an intangible assets metric system. When these forms of capital are brought to economic life in fungible measures akin to barrels, bushels, or kilowatts, then they will be monetized commodities in the full capitalist sense of the term, ownable and purchasable products with recognizable standard definitions, uniform quantitative volumes, and discernable variations in quality. Then, and only then, will individuals gain economic control over their most important assets. Then, and only then, will we obtain the information we need to transform education, health care, social services, and human and natural resource management into industries in which quality is appropriately rewarded. Then, and only then, will we have the means for measuring genuine progress and authentic wealth in ways that correct the insufficiencies of the GNP/GDP indexes.

The creation of efficiently functioning markets for all forms of capital is an economic, political, and moral necessity (see Ekins, 1992 and others). We say we manage what we measure, but very little effort has been put into measuring (with scientific validity and precision in universally uniform and accessible aggregate terms) 90% of the capital resources under management: human abilities, motivations, and health; social commitment, loyalty, and trust; and nature’s air and water purification and ecosystem services (see Hawken, Lovins, & Lovins, 1999, among others). All human suffering, sociopolitical discontent, and environmental degradation are rooted in the same common cause: waste (see Hawken, et al., 1999). To apply lean thinking to removing the wasteful destruction of our most valuable resources, we must measure these resources in ways that allow us to coordinate and align our decisions and behaviors virtually, at a distance, with no need for communicating and negotiating the local particulars of the hows and whys of our individual situations. For more information on these ideas, search “living capital metrics” and see works like the following:

Ekins, P. (1992). A four-capital model of wealth creation. In P. Ekins & M. Max-Neef (Eds.), Real-life economics: Understanding wealth creation (pp. 147-15). London: Routledge.

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

Hawken, P., Lovins, A., & Lovins, H. L. (1999). Natural capitalism: Creating the next industrial revolution. New York: Little, Brown, and Co.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

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

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

Debt, Revenue, and Changing the Way Washington Works: The Greatest Entrepreneurial Opportunity of Our Time

“Holding the line” on spending and taxes does not make for a fundamental transformation of the way Washington works. Simply doing less of one thing is just a small quantitative change that does nothing to build positive results or set a new direction. What we need is a qualitative metamorphosis akin to a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. In contrast with this beautiful image of natural processes, the arguments and so-called principles being invoked in the sham debate that’s going on are nothing more than fights over where to put deck chairs on the Titanic.

What sort of transformation is possible? What kind of a metamorphosis will start from who and where we are, but redefine us sustainably and responsibly? As I have repeatedly explained in this blog, my conference presentations, and my publications, with numerous citations of authoritative references, we already possess all of the elements of the transformation. We have only to organize and deploy them. Of course, discerning what the resources are and how to put them together is not obvious. And though I believe we will do what needs to be done when we are ready, it never hurts to prepare for that moment. So here’s another take on the situation.

Infrastructure that supports lean thinking is the name of the game. Lean thinking focuses on identifying and removing waste. Anything that consumes resources but does not contribute to the quality of the end product is waste. We have enormous amounts of wasteful inefficiency in many areas of our economy. These inefficiencies are concentrated in areas in which management is hobbled by low quality information, where we lack the infrastructure we need.

Providing and capitalizing on this infrastructure is The Greatest Entrepreneurial Opportunity of Our Time. Changing the way Washington (ha! I just typed “Wastington”!) works is the same thing as mitigating the sources of risk that caused the current economic situation. Making government behave more like a business requires making the human, social, and natural capital markets more efficient. Making those markets more efficient requires reducing the costs of transactions. Those costs are determined in large part by information quality, which is a function of measurement.

It is often said that the best way to reduce the size of government is to move the functions of government into the marketplace. But this proposal has never been associated with any sense of the infrastructural components needed to really make the idea work. Simply reducing government without an alternative way of performing its functions is irresponsible and destructive. And many of those who rail on and on about how bad or inefficient government is fail to recognize that the government is us. We get the government we deserve. The government we get follows directly from the kind of people we are. Government embodies our image of ourselves as a people. In the US, this is what having a representative form of government means. “We the people” participate in our society’s self-governance not just by voting, writing letters to congress, or demonstrating, but in the way we spend our money, where we choose to live, work, and go to school, and in every decision we make. No one can take a breath of air, a drink of water, or a bite of food without trusting everyone else to not carelessly or maliciously poison them. No one can buy anything or drive down the street without expecting others to behave in predictable ways that ensure order and safety.

But we don’t just trust blindly. We have systems in place to guard against those who would ruthlessly seek to gain at everyone else’s expense. And systems are the point. No individual person or firm, no matter how rich, could afford to set up and maintain the systems needed for checking and enforcing air, water, food, and workplace safety measures. Society as a whole invests in the infrastructure of measures created, maintained, and regulated by the government’s Department of Commerce and the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST). The moral importance and the economic value of measurement standards has been stressed historically over many millennia, from the Bible and the Quran to the Magna Carta and the French Revolution to the US Constitution. Uniform weights and measures are universally recognized and accepted as essential to fair trade.

So how is it that we nonetheless apparently expect individuals and local organizations like schools, businesses, and hospitals to measure and monitor students’ abilities; employees’ skills and engagement; patients’ health status, functioning, and quality of care; etc.? Why do we not demand common currencies for the exchange of value in human, social, and natural capital markets? Why don’t we as a society compel our representatives in government to institute the will of the people and create new standards for fair trade in education, health care, social services, and environmental management?

Measuring better is not just a local issue! It is a systemic issue! When measurement is objective and when we all think together in the common language of a shared metric (like hours, volts, inches or centimeters, ounces or grams, degrees Fahrenheit or Celsius, etc.), then and only then do we have the means we need to implement lean strategies and create new efficiencies systematically. We need an Intangible Assets Metric System.

The current recession in large part was caused by failures in measuring and managing trust, responsibility, loyalty, and commitment. Similar problems in measuring and managing human, social, and natural capital have led to endlessly spiraling costs in education, health care, social services, and environmental management. The problems we’re experiencing in these areas are intimately tied up with the way we formulate and implement group level decision making processes and policies based in statistics when what we need is to empower individuals with the tools and information they need to make their own decisions and policies. We will not and cannot metamorphose from caterpillar to butterfly until we create the infrastructure through which we each can take full ownership and control of our individual shares of the human, social, and natural capital stock that is rightfully ours.

We well know that we manage what we measure. What counts gets counted. Attention tends to be focused on what we’re accountable for. But–and this is vitally important–many of the numbers called measures do not provide the information we need for management. And not only are lots of numbers giving us low quality information, there are far too many of them! We could have better and more information from far fewer numbers.

Previous postings in this blog document the fact that we have the intellectual, political, scientific, and economic resources we need to measure and manage human, social, and natural capital for authentic wealth. And the issue is not a matter of marshaling the will. It is hard to imagine how there could be more demand for better management of intangible assets than there is right now. The problem in meeting that demand is a matter of imagining how to start the ball rolling. What configuration of investments and resources will start the process of bursting open the chrysalis? How will the demand for meaningful mediating instruments be met in a way that leads to the spreading of the butterfly’s wings? It is an exciting time to be alive.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

A New Agenda for Measurement Theory and Practice in Education and Health Care

Two key issues on my agenda offer different answers to the question “Why do you do things the way you do in measurement theory and practice?”

First, we can take up the “Because of…” answer to this question. We need to articulate an historical account of measurement that does three things:

1. that builds on Rasch’s use of Maxwell’s method of analogy by employing it and expanding on it in new applications;
2. that unifies the vocabulary and concepts of measurement across the sciences into a single framework so far as possible by situating probabilistic models of invariant individual-level within-variable phenomena in the context of measurement’s GIGO principle and data-to-model fit, as distinct from the interactions of group-level between-variable phenomena in the context of statistics’ model-to-data fit; and
3. that stresses the social, collective cognition facilitated by networks of individuals whose point-of-use measurement-informed decisions and behaviors are coordinated and harmonized virtually, at a distance, with no need for communication or negotiation.

We need multiple publications in leading journals on these issues, as well as one or more books that people can cite as a way of making this real and true history of measurement, properly speaking, credible and accepted in the mainstream. This web site http://ssrn.com/abstract=1698919 is a draft article of my own in this vein that I offer for critique; other material is available on request. Anyone who works on this paper with me and makes a substantial contribution to its publication will be added as co-author.

Second, we can take up the “In order that…” answer to the question “Why do you do things the way you do?” From this point of view, we need to broaden the scope of the measurement research agenda beyond data analysis, estimation, models, and fit assessment in three ways:

1. by emphasizing predictive construct theories that exhibit the fullest possible understanding of what is measured and so enable the routine reproduction of desired proportionate effects efficiently, with no need to analyze data to obtain an estimate;
2. by defining the standard units to which all calibrated instruments measuring given constructs are traceable; and
3. by disseminating to front line users on mass scales instruments measuring in publicly available standard units and giving immediate feedback at the point of use.

These two sets of issues define a series of talking points that together constitute a new narrative for measurement in education, psychology, health care, and many other fields. We and others may see our way to organizing new professional societies, new journals, new university-based programs of study, etc. around these principles.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

The Moral Implications of the Concept of Human Capital: More on How to Create Living Capital Markets

The moral reprehensibility of the concept of human capital hinges on its use in rationalizing impersonal business decisions in the name of profits. Even when the viability of the organization is at stake, the discarding of people (referred to in some human resource departments as “taking out the trash”) entails degrees of psychological and economic injury no one should have to suffer, or inflict.

There certainly is a justified need for a general concept naming the productive capacity of labor. But labor is far more than a capacity for work. No one’s working life should be reduced to a job description. Labor involves a wide range of different combinations of skills, abilities, motivations, health, and trustworthiness. Human capital has then come to be broken down into a wide variety of forms, such as literacy capital, health capital, social capital, etc.

The metaphoric use of the word “capital” in the phrase “human capital” referring to stocks of available human resources rings hollow. The traditional concept of labor as a form of capital is an unjustified reduction of diverse capacities in itself. But the problem goes deeper. Intangible resources like labor are not represented and managed in the forms that make markets for tangible resources efficient. Transferable representations, like titles and deeds, give property a legal status as owned and an economic status as financially fungible. And in those legal and economic terms, tangible forms of capital give capitalism its hallmark signification as the lifeblood of the cycle of investment, profits, and reinvestment.

Intangible forms of capital, in contrast, are managed without the benefit of any standardized way of proving what is owned, what quantity or quality of it exists, and what it costs. Human, social, and natural forms of capital are therefore managed directly, by acting in an unmediated way on whomever or whatever embodies them. Such management requires, even in capitalist economies, the use of what are inherently socialistic methods, as these are the only methods available for dealing with the concrete individual people, communities, and ecologies involved (Fisher, 2002, 2011; drawing from Hayek, 1948, 1988; De Soto, 2000).

The assumption that transferable representations of intangible assets are inconceivable or inherently reductionist is, however, completely mistaken. All economic capital is ultimately brought to life (conceived, gestated, midwifed, and nurtured to maturity) as scientific capital. Scientific measurability is what makes it possible to add up the value of shares of stock across holdings, to divide something owned into shares, and to represent something in a court or a bank in a portable form (Latour, 1987; Fisher, 2002, 2011).

Only when you appreciate this distinction between dead and living capital, between capital represented on transferable instruments and capital that is not, then you can see that the real tragedy is not in the treatment of labor as capital. No, the real tragedy is in the way everyone is denied the full exercise of their rights over the skills, abilities, health, motivations, trustworthiness, and environmental resources that are rightly their own personal, private property.

Being homogenized at the population level into an interchangeable statistic is tragic enough. But when we leave the matter here, we fail to see and to grasp the meaning of the opportunities that are lost in that myopic world view. As I have been at pains in this blog to show, statistics are not measures. Statistical models of interactions between several variables at the group level are not the same thing as measurement models of interactions within a single variable at the individual level. When statistical models are used in place of measurement models, the result is inevitably numbers without a soul. When measurement models of individual response processes are used to produce meaningful estimates of how much of something someone possesses, a whole different world of possibilities opens up.

In the same way that the Pythagorean Theorem applies to any triangle, so, too, do the coordinates from the international geodetic survey make it possible to know everything that needs to be known about the location and disposition of a piece of real estate. Advanced measurement models in the psychosocial sciences are making it possible to arrive at similarly convenient and objective ways of representing the quality and quantity of intangible assets. Instead of being just one number among many others, real measures tell a story that situates each of us relative to everyone else in a meaningful way.

The practical meaning of the maxim “you manage what you measure” stems from those instances in which measures embody the fullness of the very thing that is the object of management interest. An engine’s fuel efficiency, or the volume of commodities produced, for instance, are things that can be managed less or more efficiently because there are measures of them that directly represent just what we want to control. Lean thinking enables the removal of resources that do not contribute to the production of the desired end result.

Many metrics, however, tend to obscure and distract from what need to be managed. The objects of measurement may seem to be obviously related to what needs to be managed, but dealing with each of them piecemeal results in inefficient and ineffective management. In these instances, instead of the characteristic cycle of investment, profit, and reinvestment, there seems only a bottomless pit absorbing ever more investment and never producing a profit. Why?

The economic dysfunctionality of intangible asset markets is intimately tied up with the moral dysfunctionality of those markets. Drawing an analogy from a recent analysis of political freedom (Shirky, 2010), economic freedom has to be accompanied by a market society economically literate enough, economically empowered enough, and interconnected enough to trade on the capital stocks issued. Western society, and increasingly the entire global society, is arguably economically literate and sufficiently interconnected to exercise economic freedom.

Economic empowerment is another matter entirely. There is no economic power without fungible capital, without ways of representing resources of all kinds, tangible and intangible, that transparently show what is available, how much of it there is, and what quality it is. A form of currency expressing the value of that capital is essential, but money is wildly insufficient to the task of determining the quality and quantity of the available capital stocks.

Today’s education, health care, human resource, and environmental quality markets are the diametric opposite of the markets in which investors, producers, and consumers are empowered. Only when dead human, social, and natural capital is brought to life in efficient markets (Fisher, 2011) will we empower ourselves with fuller degrees of creative control over our economic lives.

The crux of the economic empowerment issue is this: in the current context of inefficient intangibles markets, everyone is personally commodified. Everything that makes me valuable to an employer or investor or customer, my skills, motivations, health, and trustworthiness, is unjustifiably reduced to a homogenized unit of labor. And in the social and environmental quality markets, voting our shares is cumbersome, expensive, and often ineffective because of the immense amount of work that has to be done to defend each particular living manifestation of the value we want to protect.

Concentrated economic power is exercised in the mass markets of dead, socialized intangible assets in ways that we are taught to think of as impersonal and indifferent to each of us as individuals, but which is actually experienced by us as intensely personal.

So what is the difference between being treated personally as a commodity and being treated impersonally as a commodity? This is the same as asking what it would mean to be empowered economically with creative control over the stocks of human, social, and natural capital that are rightfully our private property. This difference is the difference between dead and living capital (Fisher, 2002, 2011).

Freedom of economic communication, realized in the trade of privately owned stocks of any form of capital, ought to be the highest priority in the way we think about the infrastructure of a sustainable and socially responsible economy. For maximum efficiency, that freedom requires a common meaningful and rigorous quantitative language enabling determinations of what exactly is for sale, and its quality, quantity, and unit price. As I have ad nauseum repeated in this blog, measurement based in scientifically calibrated instrumentation traceable to consensus standards is absolutely essential to meeting this need.

Coming in at a very close second to the highest priority is securing the ability to trade. A strong market society, where people can exercise the right to control their own private property—their personal stocks of human, social, and natural capital—in highly efficient markets, is more important than policies, regulations, and five-year plans dictating how masses of supposedly homogenous labor, social, and environmental commodities are priced and managed.

So instead of reacting to the downside of the business cycle with a socialistic safety net, how might a capitalistic one prove more humane, moral, and economically profitable? Instead of guaranteeing a limited amount of unemployment insurance funded through taxes, what we should have are requirements for minimum investments in social capital. Instead of employment in the usual sense of the term, with its implications of hiring and firing, we should have an open market for fungible human capital, in which everyone can track the price of their stock, attract and make new investments, take profits and income, upgrade the quality and/or quantity of their stock, etc.

In this context, instead of receiving unemployment compensation, workers not currently engaged in remunerated use of their skills would cash in some of their accumulated stock of social capital. The cost of social capital would go up in periods of high demand, as during the recent economic downturns caused by betrayals of trust and commitment (which are, in effect, involuntary expenditures of social capital). Conversely, the cost of human capital would also fluctuate with supply and demand, with the profits (currently referred to as wages) turned by individual workers rising and falling with the price of their stocks. These ups and downs, being absorbed by everyone in proportion to their investments, would reduce the distorted proportions we see today in the shares of the rewards and punishments allotted.

Though no one would have a guaranteed wage, everyone would have the opportunity to manage their capital to the fullest, by upgrading it, keeping it current, and selling it to the highest bidder. Ebbing and flowing tides would more truly lift and drop all boats together, with the drops backed up with the social capital markets’ tangible reassurance that we are all in this together. This kind of a social capitalism transforms the supposedly impersonal but actually highly personal indifference of flows in human capital into a more fully impersonal indifference in which individuals have the potential to maximize the realization of their personal goals.

What we need is to create a visible alternative to the bankrupt economic system in a kind of reverse shock doctrine. Eleanor Roosevelt often said that the thing we are most afraid of is the thing we most need to confront if we are to grow. The more we struggle against what we fear, the further we are carried away from what we want. Only when we relax into the binding constraints do we find them loosened. Only when we channel overwhelming force against itself or in a productive direction can we withstand attack. When we find the courage to go where the wild things are and look the monsters in the eye will we have the opportunity to see if their fearful aspect is transformed to playfulness. What is left is often a more mundane set of challenges, the residuals of a developmental transition to a new level of hierarchical complexity.

And this is the case with the moral implications of the concept of human capital. Treating individuals as fungible commodities is a way that some use to protect themselves from feeling like monsters and from being discarded as well. Those who find themselves removed from the satisfactions of working life can blame the shortsightedness of their former colleagues, or the ugliness of the unfeeling system. But neither defensive nor offensive rationalizations do anything to address the actual problem, and the problem has nothing to do with the morality or the immorality of the concept of human capital.

The problem is the problem. That is, the way we approach and define the problem delimits the sphere of the creative options we have for solving it. As Henry Ford is supposed to have said, whether you think you can or you think you cannot, you’re probably right. It is up to us to decide whether we can create an economic system that justifies its reductions and actually lives up to its billing as impersonal and unbiased, or if we cannot. Either way, we’ll have to accept and live with the consequences.

References

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

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

Hayek, F. A. (1948). Individualism and economic order. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hayek, F. A. (1988). The fatal conceit: The errors of socialism (W. W. Bartley, III, Ed.) The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Shirky, C. (2010, December 20). The political power of social media: Technology, the public sphere, and political change. Foreign Affairs, 90(1), http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

A Second Simple Example of Measurement’s Role in Reducing Transaction Costs, Enhancing Market Efficiency, and Enables the Pricing of Intangible Assets

The prior post here showed why we should not confuse counts of things with measures of amounts, though counts are the natural starting place to begin constructing measures. That first simple example focused on an analogy between counting oranges and measuring the weight of oranges, versus counting correct answers on tests and measuring amounts of ability. This second example extends the first by, in effect, showing what happens when we want to aggregate value not just across different counts of some one thing but across different counts of different things. The point will be, in effect, to show how the relative values of apples, oranges, grapes, and bananas can be put into a common frame of reference and compared in a practical and convenient way.

For instance, you may go into a grocery store to buy raspberries and blackberries, and I go in to buy cantaloupe and watermelon. Your cost per individual fruit will be very low, and mine will be very high, but neither of us will find this annoying, confusing, or inconvenient because your fruits are very small, and mine, very large. Conversely, your cost per kilogram will be much higher than mine, but this won’t cause either of us any distress because we both recognize the differences in the labor, handling, nutritional, and culinary value of our purchases.

But what happens when we try to purchase something as complex as a unit of socioeconomic development? The eight UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) represent a start at a systematic effort to bring human, social, and natural capital together into the same economic and accountability framework as liquid and manufactured capital, and property. But that effort is stymied by the inefficiency and cost of making and using measures of the goals achieved. The existing MDG databases (http://data.un.org/Browse.aspx?d=MDG), and summary reports present overwhelming numbers of numbers. Individual indicators are presented for each year, each country, each region, and each program, goal by goal, target by target, indicator by indicator, and series by series, in an indigestible volume of data.

Though there are no doubt complex mathematical methods by which a philanthropic, governmental, or NGO investor might determine how much development is gained per million dollars invested, the cost of obtaining impact measures is so high that most funding decisions are made with little information concerning expected returns (Goldberg, 2009). Further, the percentages of various needs met by leading social enterprises typically range from 0.07% to 3.30%, and needs are growing, not diminishing. Progress at current rates means that it would take thousands of years to solve today’s problems of human suffering, social disparity, and environmental quality. The inefficiency of human, social, and natural capital markets is so overwhelming that there is little hope for significant improvements without the introduction of fundamental infrastructural supports, such as an Intangible Assets Metric System.

A basic question that needs to be asked of the MDG system is, how can anyone make any sense out of so much data? Most of the indicators are evaluated in terms of counts of the number of times something happens, the number of people affected, or the number of things observed to be present. These counts are usually then divided by the maximum possible (the count of the total population) and are expressed as percentages or rates.

As previously explained in various posts in this blog, counts and percentages are not measures in any meaningful sense. They are notoriously difficult to interpret, since the quantitative meaning of any given unit difference varies depending on the size of what is counted, or where the percentage falls in the 0-100 continuum. And because counts and percentages are interpreted one at a time, it is very difficult to know if and when any number included in the sheer mass of data is reasonable, all else considered, or if it is inconsistent with other available facts.

A study of the MDG data must focus on these three potential areas of data quality improvement: consistency evaluation, volume reduction, and interpretability. Each builds on the others. With consistent data lending themselves to summarization in sufficient statistics, data volume can be drastically reduced with no loss of information (Andersen, 1977, 1999; Wright, 1977, 1997), data quality can be readily assessed in terms of sufficiency violations (Smith, 2000; Smith & Plackner, 2009), and quantitative measures can be made interpretable in terms of a calibrated ruler’s repeatedly reproducible hierarchy of indicators (Bond & Fox, 2007; Masters, Lokan, & Doig, 1994).

The primary data quality criteria are qualitative relevance and meaningfulness, on the one hand, and mathematical rigor, on the other. The point here is one of following through on the maxim that we manage what we measure, with the goal of measuring in such a way that management is better focused on the program mission and not distracted by accounting irrelevancies.

Method

As written and deployed, each of the MDG indicators has the face and content validity of providing information on each respective substantive area of interest. But, as has been the focus of repeated emphases in this blog, counting something is not the same thing as measuring it.

Counts or rates of literacy or unemployment are not, in and of themselves, measures of development. Their capacity to serve as contributing indications of developmental progress is an empirical question that must be evaluated experimentally against the observable evidence. The measurement of progress toward an overarching developmental goal requires inferences made from a conceptual order of magnitude above and beyond that provided in the individual indicators. The calibration of an instrument for assessing progress toward the realization of the Millennium Development Goals requires, first, a reorganization of the existing data, and then an analysis that tests explicitly the relevant hypotheses as to the potential for quantification, before inferences supporting the comparison of measures can be scientifically supported.

A subset of the MDG data was selected from the MDG database available at http://data.un.org/Browse.aspx?d=MDG, recoded, and analyzed using Winsteps (Linacre, 2011). At least one indicator was selected from each of the eight goals, with 22 in total. All available data from these 22 indicators were recorded for each of 64 countries.

The reorganization of the data is nothing but a way of making the interpretation of the percentages explicit. The meaning of any one country’s percentage or rate of youth unemployment, cell phone users, or literacy has to be kept in context relative to expectations formed from other countries’ experiences. It would be nonsense to interpret any single indicator as good or bad in isolation. Sometimes 30% represents an excellent state of affairs, other times, a terrible one.

Therefore, the distributions of each indicator’s percentages across the 64 countries were divided into ranges and converted to ratings. A lower rating uniformly indicates a status further away from the goal than a higher rating. The ratings were devised by dividing the frequency distribution of each indicator roughly into thirds.

For instance, the youth unemployment rate was found to vary such that the countries furthest from the desired goal had rates of 25% and more(rated 1), and those closest to or exceeding the goal had rates of 0-10% (rated 3), leaving the middle range (10-25%) rated 2. In contrast, percentages of the population that are undernourished were rated 1 for 35% or more, 2 for 15-35%, and 3 for less than 15%.

Thirds of the distributions were decided upon only on the basis of the investigator’s prior experience with data of this kind. A more thorough approach to the data would begin from a finer-grained rating system, like that structuring the MDG table at http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Resources/Static/Products/Progress2008/MDG_Report_2008_Progress_Chart_En.pdf. This greater detail would be sought in order to determine empirically just how many distinctions each indicator can support and contribute to the overall measurement system.

Sixty-four of the available 336 data points were selected for their representativeness, with no duplications of values and with a proportionate distribution along the entire continuum of observed values.

Data from the same 64 countries and the same years were then sought for the subsequent indicators. It turned out that the years in which data were available varied across data sets. Data within one or two years of the target year were sometimes substituted for missing data.

The data were analyzed twice, first with each indicator allowed its own rating scale, parameterizing each of the category difficulties separately for each item, and then with the full rating scale model, as the results of the first analysis showed all indicators shared strong consistency in the rating structure.

Results

Data were 65.2% complete. Countries were assessed on an average of 14.3 of the 22 indicators, and each indicator was applied on average to 41.7 of the 64 country cases. Measurement reliability was .89-.90, depending on how measurement error is estimated. Cronbach’s alpha for the by-country scores was .94. Calibration reliability was .93-.95. The rating scale worked well (see Linacre, 2002, for criteria). The data fit the measurement model reasonably well, with satisfactory data consistency, meaning that the hypothesis of a measurable developmental construct was not falsified.

The main result for our purposes here concerns how satisfactory data consistency makes it possible to dramatically reduce data volume and improve data interpretability. The figure below illustrates how. What does it mean for data volume to be drastically reduced with no loss of information? Let’s see exactly how much the data volume is reduced for the ten item data subset shown in the figure below.

The horizontal continuum from -100 to 1300 in the figure is the metric, the ruler or yardstick. The number of countries at various locations along that ruler is shown across the bottom of the figure. The mean (M), first standard deviation (S), and second standard deviation (T) are shown beneath the numbers of countries. There are ten countries with a measure of just below 400, just to the left of the mean (M).

The MDG indicators are listed on the right of the figure, with the indicator most often found being achieved relative to the goals at the bottom, and the indicator least often being achieved at the top. The ratings in the middle of the figure increase from 1 to 3 left to right as the probability of goal achievement increases as the measures go from low to high. The position of the ratings in the middle of the figure shifts from left to right as one reads up the list of indicators because the difficulty of achieving the goals is increasing.

Because the ratings of the 64 countries relative to these ten goals are internally consistent, nothing but the developmental level of the country and the developmental challenge of the indicator affects the probability that a given rating will be attained. It is this relation that defines fit to a measurement model, the sufficiency of the summed ratings, and the interpretability of the scores. Given sufficient fit and consistency, any country’s measure implies a given rating on each of the ten indicators.

For instance, imagine a vertical line drawn through the figure at a measure of 500, just above the mean (M). This measure is interpreted relative to the places at which the vertical line crosses the ratings in each row associated with each of the ten items. A measure of 500 is read as implying, within a given range of error, uncertainty, or confidence, a rating of

• 3 on debt service and female-to-male parity in literacy,
• 2 or 3 on how much of the population is undernourished and how many children under five years of age are moderately or severely underweight,
• 2 on infant mortality, the percent of the population aged 15 to 49 with HIV, and the youth unemployment rate,
• 1 or 2 the poor’s share of the national income, and
• 1 on CO2 emissions and the rate of personal computers per 100 inhabitants.

For any one country with a measure of 500 on this scale, ten percentages or rates that appear completely incommensurable and incomparable are found to contribute consistently to a single valued function, developmental goal achievement. Instead of managing each separate indicator as a universe unto itself, this scale makes it possible to manage development itself at its own level of complexity. This ten-to-one ratio of reduced data volume is more than doubled when the total of 22 items included in the scale is taken into account.

This reduction is conceptually and practically important because it focuses attention on the actual object of management, development. When the individual indicators are the focus of attention, the forest is lost for the trees. Those who disparage the validity of the maxim, you manage what you measure, are often discouraged by the the feeling of being pulled in too many directions at once. But a measure of the HIV infection rate is not in itself a measure of anything but the HIV infection rate. Interpreting it in terms of broader developmental goals requires evidence that it in fact takes a place in that larger context.

And once a connection with that larger context is established, the consistency of individual data points remains a matter of interest. As the world turns, the order of things may change, but, more likely, data entry errors, temporary data blips, and other factors will alter data quality. Such changes cannot be detected outside of the context defined by an explicit interpretive framework that requires consistent observations.

-100  100     300     500     700     900    1100    1300
|-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|  NUM   INDCTR
1                                 1  :    2    :  3     3    9  PcsPer100
1                         1   :   2    :   3            3    8  CO2Emissions
1                    1  :    2    :   3                 3   10  PoorShareNatInc
1                 1  :    2    :  3                     3   19  YouthUnempRatMF
1              1   :    2   :   3                       3    1  %HIV15-49
1            1   :   2    :   3                         3    7  InfantMortality
1          1  :    2    :  3                            3    4  ChildrenUnder5ModSevUndWgt
1         1   :    2    :  3                            3   12  PopUndernourished
1    1   :    2   :   3                                 3    6  F2MParityLit
1   :    2    :  3                                      3    5  DebtServExpInc
|-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------|  NUM   INDCTR
-100  100     300     500     700     900    1100    1300
                   1
       1   1 13445403312323 41 221    2   1   1            COUNTRIES
       T      S       M      S       T

Discussion

A key element in the results obtained here concerns the fact that the data were about 35% missing. Whether or not any given indicator was actually rated for any given country, the measure can still be interpreted as implying the expected rating. This capacity to take missing data into account can be taken advantage of systematically by calibrating a large bank of indicators. With this in hand, it becomes possible to gather only the amount of data needed to make a specific determination, or to adaptively administer the indicators so as to obtain the lowest-error (most reliable) measure at the lowest cost (with the fewest indicators administered). Perhaps most importantly, different collections of indicators can then be equated to measure in the same unit, so that impacts may be compared more efficiently.

Instead of an international developmental aid market that is so inefficient as to preclude any expectation of measured returns on investment, setting up a calibrated bank of indicators to which all measures are traceable opens up numerous desirable possibilities. The cost of assessing and interpreting the data informing aid transactions could be reduced to negligible amounts, and the management of the processes and outcomes in which that aid is invested would be made much more efficient by reduced data volume and enhanced information content. Because capital would flow more efficiently to where supply is meeting demand, nonproducers would be cut out of the market, and the effectiveness of the aid provided would be multiplied many times over.

The capacity to harmonize counts of different but related events into a single measurement system presents the possibility that there may be a bright future for outcomes-based budgeting in education, health care, human resource management, environmental management, housing, corrections, social services, philanthropy, and international development. It may seem wildly unrealistic to imagine such a thing, but the return on the investment would be so monumental that not checking it out would be even crazier.

A full report on the MDG data, with the other references cited, is available on my SSRN page at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1739386.

Goldberg, S. H. (2009). Billions of drops in millions of buckets: Why philanthropy doesn’t advance social progress. New York: Wiley.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

A Simple Example of How Better Measurement Creates New Market Efficiencies, Reduces Transaction Costs, and Enables the Pricing of Intangible Assets

One of the ironies of life is that we often overlook the obvious in favor of the obscure. And so one hears of huge resources poured into finding and capitalizing on opportunities that provide infinitesimally small returns, while other opportunities—with equally certain odds of success but far more profitable returns—are completely neglected.

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) reports returns on investment ranging from 32% to over 400% in 32 metrological improvements made in semiconductors, construction, automation, computers, materials, manufacturing, chemicals, photonics, communications and pharmaceuticals (NIST, 2009). Previous posts in this blog offer more information on the economic value of metrology. The point is that the returns obtained from improvements in the measurement of tangible assets will likely also be achieved in the measurement of intangible assets.

How? With a little bit of imagination, each stage in the development of increasingly meaningful, efficient, and useful measures described in this previous post can be seen as implying a significant return on investment. As those returns are sought, investors will coordinate and align different technologies and resources relative to a roadmap of how these stages are likely to unfold in the future, as described in this previous post. The basic concepts of how efficient and meaningful measurement reduces transaction costs and market frictions, and how it brings capital to life, are explained and documented in my publications (Fisher, 2002-2011), but what would a concrete example of the new value created look like?

The examples I have in mind hinge on the difference between counting and measuring. Counting is a natural and obvious thing to do when we need some indication of how much of something there is. But counting is not measuring (Cooper & Humphry, 2010; Wright, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1999). This is not some minor academic distinction of no practical use or consequence. It is rather the source of the vast majority of the problems we have in comparing outcome and performance measures.

Imagine how things would be if we couldn’t weigh fruit in a grocery store, and all we could do was count pieces. We can tell when eight small oranges possess less overall mass of fruit than four large ones by weighing them; the eight small oranges might weigh .75 kilograms (about 1.6 pounds) while the four large ones come in at 1.0 kilo (2.2 pounds). If oranges were sold by count instead of weight, perceptive traders would buy small oranges and make more money selling them than they could if they bought large ones.

But we can’t currently arrive so easily at the comparisons we need when we’re buying and selling intangible assets, like those produced as the outcomes of educational, health care, or other services. So I want to walk through a couple of very down-to-earth examples to bring the point home. Today we’ll focus on the simplest version of the story, and tomorrow we’ll take up a little more complicated version, dealing with the counts, percentages, and scores used in balanced scorecard and dashboard metrics of various kinds.

What if you score eight on one reading test and I score four on a different reading test? Who has more reading ability? In the same way that we might be able to tell just by looking that eight small oranges are likely to have less actual orange fruit than four big ones, we might also be able to tell just by looking that eight easy (short, common) words can likely be read correctly with less reading ability than four difficult (long, rare) words can be.

So let’s analyze the difference between buying oranges and buying reading ability. We’ll set up three scenarios for buying reading ability. In all three, we’ll imagine we’re comparing how we buy oranges with the way we would have to go about buying reading ability today if teachers were paid for the gains made on the tests they administer at the beginning and end of the school year.

In the first scenario, the teachers make up their own tests. In the second, the teachers each use a different standardized test. In the third, each teacher uses a computer program that draws questions from the same online bank of precalibrated items to construct a unique test custom tailored to each student. Reading ability scenario one is likely the most commonly found in real life. Scenario three is the rarest, but nonetheless describes a situation that has been available to millions of students in the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere for several years. Scenarios one, two and three correspond with developmental levels one, three, and five described in a previous blog entry.

Buying Oranges

When you go into one grocery store and I go into another, we don’t have any oranges with us. When we leave, I have eight and you have four. I have twice as many oranges as you, but yours weigh a kilo, about a third more than mine (.75 kilos).

When we paid for the oranges, the transaction was finished in a few seconds. Neither one of us experienced any confusion, annoyance, or inconvenience in relation to the quality of information we had on the amount of orange fruits we were buying. I did not, however, pay twice as much as you did. In fact, you paid more for yours than I did for mine, in direct proportion to the difference in the measured amounts.

No negotiations were necessary to consummate the transactions, and there was no need for special inquiries about how much orange we were buying. We knew from experience in this and other stores that the prices we paid were comparable with those offered in other times and places. Our information was cheap, as it was printed on the bag of oranges or could be read off a scale, and it was very high quality, as the measures were directly comparable with measures from any other scale in any other store. So, in buying oranges, the impact of information quality on the overall cost of the transaction was so inexpensive as to be negligible.

Buying Reading Ability (Scenario 1)

So now you and I go through third grade as eight year olds. You’re in one school and I’m in another. We have different teachers. Each teacher makes up his or her own reading tests. When we started the school year, we each took a reading test (different ones), and we took another (again, different ones) as we ended the school year.

For each test, your teacher counted up your correct answers and divided by the total number of questions; so did mine. You got 72% correct on the first one, and 94% correct on the last one. I got 83% correct on the first one, and 86% correct on the last one. Your score went up 22%, much more than the 3% mine went up. But did you learn more? It is impossible to tell. What if both of your tests were easier—not just for you or for me but for everyone—than both of mine? What if my second test was a lot harder than my first one? On the other hand, what if your tests were harder than mine? Perhaps you did even better than your scores seem to indicate.

We’ll just exclude from consideration other factors that might come to bear, such as whether your tests were significantly longer or shorter than mine, or if one of us ran out of time and did not answer a lot of questions.

If our parents had to pay the reading teacher at the end of the school year for the gains that were made, how would they tell what they were getting for their money? What if your teacher gave a hard test at the start of the year and an easy one at the end of the year so that you’d have a big gain and your parents would have to pay more? What if my teacher gave an easy test at the start of the year and a hard one at the end, so that a really high price could be put on very small gains? If our parents were to compare their experiences in buying our improved reading ability, they would have a lot of questions about how much improvement was actually obtained. They would be confused and annoyed at how inconvenient the scores are, because they are difficult, if not impossible, to compare. A lot of time and effort might be invested in examining the words and sentences in each of the four reading tests to try to determine how easy or hard they are in relation to each other. Or, more likely, everyone would throw their hands up and pay as little as they possibly can for outcomes they don’t understand.

Buying Reading Ability (Scenario 2)

In this scenario, we are third graders again, in different schools with different reading teachers. Now, instead of our teachers making up their own tests, our reading abilities are measured at the beginning and the end of the school year using two different standardized tests sold by competing testing companies. You’re in a private suburban school that’s part of an independent schools association. I’m in a public school along with dozens of others in an urban school district.

For each test, our parents received a report in the mail showing our scores. As before, we know how many questions we each answered correctly, and, unlike before, we don’t know which particular questions we got right or wrong. Finally, we don’t know how easy or hard your tests were relative to mine, but we know that the two tests you took were equated, and so were the two I took. That means your tests will show how much reading ability you gained, and so will mine.

We have one new bit of information we didn’t have before, and that’s a percentile score. Now we know that at the beginning of the year, with a percentile ranking of 72, you performed better than 72% of the other private school third graders taking this test, and at the end of the year you performed better than 76% of them. In contrast, I had percentiles of 84 and 89.

The question we have to ask now is if our parents are going to pay for the percentile gain, or for the actual gain in reading ability. You and I each learned more than our peers did on average, since our percentile scores went up, but this would not work out as a satisfactory way to pay teachers. Averages being averages, if you and I learned more and faster, someone else learned less and slower, so that, in the end, it all balances out. Are we to have teachers paying parents when their children learn less, simply redistributing money in a zero sum game?

And so, additional individualized reports are sent to our parents by the testing companies. Your tests are equated with each other, and they measure in a comparable unit that ranges from 120 to 480. You had a starting score of 235 and finished the year with a score of 420, for a gain of 185.

The tests I took are comparable and measure in the same unit, too, but not the same unit as your tests measure in. Scores on my tests range from 400 to 1200. I started the year with a score of 790, and finished at 1080, for a gain of 290.

Now the confusion in the first scenario is overcome, in part. Our parents can see that we each made real gains in reading ability. The difficulty levels of the two tests you took are the same, as are the difficulties of the two tests I took. But our parents still don’t know what to pay the teacher because they can’t tell if you or I learned more. You had lower percentiles and test scores than I did, but you are being compared with what is likely a higher scoring group of suburban and higher socioeconomic status students than the urban group of disadvantaged students I’m compared against. And your scores aren’t comparable with mine, so you might have started and finished with more reading ability than I did, or maybe I had more than you. There isn’t enough information here to tell.

So, again, the information that is provided is insufficient to the task of settling on a reasonable price for the outcomes obtained. Our parents will again be annoyed and confused by the low quality information that makes it impossible to know what to pay the teacher.

Buying Reading Ability (Scenario 3)

In the third scenario, we are still third graders in different schools with different reading teachers. This time our reading abilities are measured by tests that are completely unique. Every student has a test custom tailored to their particular ability. Unlike the tests in the first and second scenarios, however, now all of the tests have been constructed carefully on the basis of extensive data analysis and experimental tests. Different testing companies are providing the service, but they have gone to the trouble to work together to create consensus standards defining the unit of measurement for any and all reading test items.

For each test, our parents received a report in the mail showing our measures. As before, we know how many questions we each answered correctly. Now, though we don’t know which particular questions we got right or wrong, we can see typical items ordered by difficulty lined up in a way that shows us what kind of items we got wrong, and which kind we got right. And now we also know your tests were equated relative to mine, so we can compare how much reading ability you gained relative to how much I gained. Now our parents can confidently determine how much they should pay the teacher, at least in proportion to their children’s relative measures. If our measured gains are equal, the same payment can be made. If one of us obtained more value, then proportionately more should be paid.

In this third scenario, we have a situation directly analogous to buying oranges. You have a measured amount of increased reading ability that is expressed in the same unit as my gain in reading ability, just as the weights of the oranges are comparable. Further, your test items were not identical with mine, and so the difficulties of the items we took surely differed, just as the sizes of the oranges we bought did.

This third scenario could be made yet more efficient by removing the need for creating and maintaining a calibrated item bank, as described by Stenner and Stone (2003) and in the sixth developmental level in a prior blog post here. Also, additional efficiencies could be gained by unifying the interpretation of the reading ability measures, so that progress through high school can be tracked with respect to the reading demands of adult life (Williamson, 2008).

Comparison of the Purchasing Experiences

In contrast with the grocery store experience, paying for increased reading ability in the first scenario is fraught with low quality information that greatly increases the cost of the transactions. The information is of such low quality that, of course, hardly anyone bothers to go to the trouble to try to decipher it. Too much cost is associated with the effort to make it worthwhile. So, no one knows how much gain in reading ability is obtained, or what a unit gain might cost.

When a school district or educational researchers mount studies to try to find out what it costs to improve reading ability in third graders in some standardized unit, they find so much unexplained variation in the costs that they, too, raise more questions than answers.

In grocery stores and other markets, we don’t place the cost of making the value comparison on the consumer or the merchant. Instead, society as a whole picks up the cost by funding the creation and maintenance of consensus standard metrics. Until we take up the task of doing the same thing for intangible assets, we cannot expect human, social, and natural capital markets to obtain the efficiencies we take for granted in markets for tangible assets and property.

References

Cooper, G., & Humphry, S. M. (2010). The ontological distinction between units and entities. Synthese, pp. DOI 10.1007/s11229-010-9832-1.

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. (2003). Measurement and communities of inquiry. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 17(3), 936-8 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt173.pdf].

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. (2005). Daredevil barnstorming to the tipping point: New aspirations for the human sciences. Journal of Applied Measurement, 6(3), 173-9 [http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com/images/FisherJAM05.pdf].

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2007, Summer). Living capital metrics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 21(1), 1092-3 [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. (2009b). NIST Critical national need idea White Paper: Metrological infrastructure for human, social, and natural capital (Tech. Rep., http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com/images/FisherNISTWhitePaper2.pdf). New Orleans: LivingCapitalMetrics.com.

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.

NIST. (2009, 20 July). Outputs and outcomes of NIST laboratory research. Available: http://www.nist.gov/director/planning/studies.cfm (Accessed 1 March 2011).

Stenner, A. J., & Stone, M. (2003). Item specification vs. item banking. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 17(3), 929-30 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt173a.htm].

Williamson, G. L. (2008). A text readability continuum for postsecondary readiness. Journal of Advanced Academics, 19(4), 602-632.

Wright, B. D. (1989). Rasch model from counting right answers: Raw scores as sufficient statistics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 3(2), 62 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt32e.htm].

Wright, B. D. (1992, Summer). Scores are not measures. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 6(1), 208 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt61n.htm].

Wright, B. D. (1993). Thinking with raw scores. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 7(2), 299-300 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt72r.htm].

Wright, B. D. (1999). Common sense for measurement. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 13(3), 704-5  [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt133h.htm].

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.

 

One of the ironies of life is that we often overlook the obvious in favor of the obscure. And so one hears of huge resources poured into finding and capitalizing on opportunities that provide infinitesimally small returns, while other opportunities—with equally certain odds of success but far more profitable returns—are completely neglected.

The National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST) reports returns on investment ranging from 32% to over 400% in 32 metrological improvements made in semiconductors, construction, automation, computers, materials, manufacturing, chemicals, photonics, communications and pharmaceuticals (NIST, 2009). Previous posts in this blog offer more information on the economic value of metrology. The point is that the returns obtained from improvements in the measurement of tangible assets will likely also be achieved in the measurement of intangible assets.

How? With a little bit of imagination, each stage in the development of increasingly meaningful, efficient, and useful measures described in this previous post can be seen as implying a significant return on investment. As those returns are sought, investors will coordinate and align different technologies and resources relative to a roadmap of how these stages are likely to unfold in the future, as described in this previous post. But what would a concrete example of the new value created look like?

The examples I have in mind hinge on the difference between counting and measuring. Counting is a natural and obvious thing to do when we need some indication of how much of something there is. But counting is not measuring (Cooper & Humphry, 2010; Wright, 1989, 1992, 1993, 1999). This is not some minor academic distinction of no practical use or consequence. It is rather the source of the vast majority of the problems we have in comparing outcome and performance measures.

Imagine how things would be if we couldn’t weigh fruit in a grocery store, and all we could do was count pieces. We can tell when eight small oranges possess less overall mass of fruit than four large ones by weighing them; the eight small oranges might weigh .75 kilograms (about 1.6 pounds) while the four large ones come in at 1.0 kilo (2.2 pounds). If oranges were sold by count instead of weight, perceptive traders would buy small oranges and make more money selling them than they could if they bought large ones.

But we can’t currently arrive so easily at the comparisons we need when we’re buying and selling intangible assets, like those produced as the outcomes of educational, health care, or other services. So I want to walk through a couple of very down-to-earth examples to bring the point home. Today we’ll focus on the simplest version of the story, and tomorrow we’ll take up a little more complicated version, dealing with the counts, percentages, and scores used in balanced scorecard and dashboard metrics of various kinds.

What if you score eight on one reading test and I score four on a different reading test? Who has more reading ability? In the same way that we might be able to tell just by looking that eight small oranges are likely to have less actual orange fruit than four big ones, we might also be able to tell just by looking that eight easy (short, common) words can likely be read correctly with less reading ability than four difficult (long, rare) words can be.

So let’s analyze the difference between buying oranges and buying reading ability. We’ll set up three scenarios for buying reading ability. In all three, we’ll imagine we’re comparing how we buy oranges with the way we would have to go about buying reading ability today if teachers were paid for the gains made on the tests they administer at the beginning and end of the school year.

In the first scenario, the teachers make up their own tests. In the second, the teachers each use a different standardized test. In the third, each teacher uses a computer program that draws questions from the same online bank of precalibrated items to construct a unique test custom tailored to each student. Reading ability scenario one is likely the most commonly found in real life. Scenario three is the rarest, but nonetheless describes a situation that has been available to millions of students in the U.S., Australia, and elsewhere for several years. Scenarios one, two and three correspond with developmental levels one, three, and five described in a previous blog entry.

Buying Oranges

When you go into one grocery store and I go into another, we don’t have any oranges with us. When we leave, I have eight and you have four. I have twice as many oranges as you, but yours weigh a kilo, about a third more than mine (.75 kilos).

When we paid for the oranges, the transaction was finished in a few seconds. Neither one of us experienced any confusion, annoyance, or inconvenience in relation to the quality of information we had on the amount of orange fruits we were buying. I did not, however, pay twice as much as you did. In fact, you paid more for yours than I did for mine, in direct proportion to the difference in the measured amounts.

No negotiations were necessary to consummate the transactions, and there was no need for special inquiries about how much orange we were buying. We knew from experience in this and other stores that the prices we paid were comparable with those offered in other times and places. Our information was cheap, as it was printed on the bag of oranges or could be read off a scale, and it was very high quality, as the measures were directly comparable with measures from any other scale in any other store. So, in buying oranges, the impact of information quality on the overall cost of the transaction was so inexpensive as to be negligible.

Buying Reading Ability (Scenario 1)

So now you and I go through third grade as eight year olds. You’re in one school and I’m in another. We have different teachers. Each teacher makes up his or her own reading tests. When we started the school year, we each took a reading test (different ones), and we took another (again, different ones) as we ended the school year.

For each test, your teacher counted up your correct answers and divided by the total number of questions; so did mine. You got 72% correct on the first one, and 94% correct on the last one. I got 83% correct on the first one, and 86% correct on the last one. Your score went up 22%, much more than the 3% mine went up. But did you learn more? It is impossible to tell. What if both of your tests were easier—not just for you or for me but for everyone—than both of mine? What if my second test was a lot harder than my first one? On the other hand, what if your tests were harder than mine? Perhaps you did even better than your scores seem to indicate.

We’ll just exclude from consideration other factors that might come to bear, such as whether your tests were significantly longer or shorter than mine, or if one of us ran out of time and did not answer a lot of questions.

If our parents had to pay the reading teacher at the end of the school year for the gains that were made, how would they tell what they were getting for their money? What if your teacher gave a hard test at the start of the year and an easy one at the end of the year so that you’d have a big gain and your parents would have to pay more? What if my teacher gave an easy test at the start of the year and a hard one at the end, so that a really high price could be put on very small gains? If our parents were to compare their experiences in buying our improved reading ability, they would have a lot of questions about how much improvement was actually obtained. They would be confused and annoyed at how inconvenient the scores are, because they are difficult, if not impossible, to compare. A lot of time and effort might be invested in examining the words and sentences in each of the four reading tests to try to determine how easy or hard they are in relation to each other. Or, more likely, everyone would throw their hands up and pay as little as they possibly can for outcomes they don’t understand.

Buying Reading Ability (Scenario 2)

In this scenario, we are third graders again, in different schools with different reading teachers. Now, instead of our teachers making up their own tests, our reading abilities are measured at the beginning and the end of the school year using two different standardized tests sold by competing testing companies. You’re in a private suburban school that’s part of an independent schools association. I’m in a public school along with dozens of others in an urban school district.

For each test, our parents received a report in the mail showing our scores. As before, we know how many questions we each answered correctly, and, as before, we don’t know which particular questions we got right or wrong. Finally, we don’t know how easy or hard your tests were relative to mine, but we know that the two tests you took were equated, and so were the two I took. That means your tests will show how much reading ability you gained, and so will mine.

But we have one new bit of information we didn’t have before, and that’s a percentile score. Now we know that at the beginning of the year, with a percentile ranking of 72, you performed better than 72% of the other private school third graders taking this test, and at the end of the year you performed better than 76% of them. In contrast, I had percentiles of 84 and 89.

The question we have to ask now is if our parents are going to pay for the percentile gain, or for the actual gain in reading ability. You and I each learned more than our peers did on average, since our percentile scores went up, but this would not work out as a satisfactory way to pay teachers. Averages being averages, if you and I learned more and faster, someone else learned less and slower, so that, in the end, it all balances out. Are we to have teachers paying parents when their children learn less, simply redistributing money in a zero sum game?

And so, additional individualized reports are sent to our parents by the testing companies. Your tests are equated with each other, so they measure in a comparable unit that ranges from 120 to 480. You had a starting score of 235 and finished the year with a score of 420, for a gain of 185.

The tests I took are comparable and measure in the same unit, too, but not the same unit as your tests measure in. Scores on my tests range from 400 to 1200. I started the year with a score of 790, and finished at 1080, for a gain of 290.

Now the confusion in the first scenario is overcome, in part. Our parents can see that we each made real gains in reading ability. The difficulty levels of the two tests you took are the same, as are the difficulties of the two tests I took. But our parents still don’t know what to pay the teacher because they can’t tell if you or I learned more. You had lower percentiles and test scores than I did, but you are being compared with what is likely a higher scoring group of suburban and higher socioeconomic status students than the urban group of disadvantaged students I’m compared against. And your scores aren’t comparable with mine, so you might have started and finished with more reading ability than I did, or maybe I had more than you. There isn’t enough information here to tell.

So, again, the information that is provided is insufficient to the task of settling on a reasonable price for the outcomes obtained. Our parents will again be annoyed and confused by the low quality information that makes it impossible to know what to pay the teacher.

Buying Reading Ability (Scenario 3)

In the third scenario, we are still third graders in different schools with different reading teachers. This time our reading abilities are measured by tests that are completely unique. Every student has a test custom tailored to their particular ability. Unlike the tests in the first and second scenarios, however, now all of the tests have been constructed carefully on the basis of extensive data analysis and experimental tests. Different testing companies are providing the service, but they have gone to the trouble to work together to create consensus standards defining the unit of measurement for any and all reading test items.

For each test, our parents received a report in the mail showing our measures. As before, we know how many questions we each answered correctly. Now, though we don’t know which particular questions we got right or wrong, we can see typical items ordered by difficulty lined up in a way that shows us what kind of items we got wrong, and which kind we got right. And now we also know your tests were equated relative to mine, so we can compare how much reading ability you gained relative to how much I gained. Now our parents can confidently determine how much they should pay the teacher, at least in proportion to their children’s relative measures. If our measured gains are equal, the same payment can be made. If one of us obtained more value, then proportionately more should be paid.

In this third scenario, we have a situation directly analogous to buying oranges. You have a measured amount of increased reading ability that is expressed in the same unit as my gain in reading ability, just as the weights of the oranges are comparable. Further, your test items were not identical with mine, and so the difficulties of the items we took surely differed, just as the sizes of the oranges we bought did.

This third scenario could be made yet more efficient by removing the need for creating and maintaining a calibrated item bank, as described by Stenner and Stone (2003) and in the sixth developmental level in a prior blog post here. Also, additional efficiencies could be gained by unifying the interpretation of the reading ability measures, so that progress through high school can be tracked with respect to the reading demands of adult life (Williamson, 2008).

Comparison of the Purchasing Experiences

In contrast with the grocery store experience, paying for increased reading ability in the first scenario is fraught with low quality information that greatly increases the cost of the transactions. The information is of such low quality that, of course, hardly anyone bothers to go to the trouble to try to decipher it. Too much cost is associated with the effort to make it worthwhile. So, no one knows how much gain in reading ability is obtained, or what a unit gain might cost.

When a school district or educational researchers mount studies to try to find out what it costs to improve reading ability in third graders in some standardized unit, they find so much unexplained variation in the costs that they, too, raise more questions than answers.

But we don’t place the cost of making the value comparison on the consumer or the merchant in the grocery store. Instead, society as a whole picks up the cost by funding the creation and maintenance of consensus standard metrics. Until we take up the task of doing the same thing for intangible assets, we cannot expect human, social, and natural capital markets to obtain the efficiencies we take for granted in markets for tangible assets and property.

References

Cooper, G., & Humphry, S. M. (2010). The ontological distinction between units and entities. Synthese, pp. DOI 10.1007/s11229-010-9832-1.

NIST. (2009, 20 July). Outputs and outcomes of NIST laboratory research. Available: http://www.nist.gov/director/planning/studies.cfm (Accessed 1 March 2011).

Stenner, A. J., & Stone, M. (2003). Item specification vs. item banking. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 17(3), 929-30 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt173a.htm].

Williamson, G. L. (2008). A text readability continuum for postsecondary readiness. Journal of Advanced Academics, 19(4), 602-632.

Wright, B. D. (1989). Rasch model from counting right answers: Raw scores as sufficient statistics. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 3(2), 62 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt32e.htm].

Wright, B. D. (1992, Summer). Scores are not measures. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 6(1), 208 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt61n.htm].

Wright, B. D. (1993). Thinking with raw scores. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 7(2), 299-300 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt72r.htm].

Wright, B. D. (1999). Common sense for measurement. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 13(3), 704-5  [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt133h.htm].

Measurement, Metrology, and the Birth of Self-Organizing, Complex Adaptive Systems

On page 145 of his book, The Mathematics of Measurement: A Critical History, John Roche quotes Charles de La Condamine (1701-1774), who, in 1747, wrote:

‘It is quite evident that the diversity of weights and measures of different countries, and frequently in the same province, are a source of embarrassment in commerce, in the study of physics, in history, and even in politics itself; the unknown names of foreign measures, the laziness or difficulty in relating them to our own give rise to confusion in our ideas and leave us in ignorance of facts which could be useful to us.’

Roche (1998, p. 145) then explains what de La Condamine is driving at, saying:

“For reasons of international communication and of civic justice, for reasons of stability over time and for accuracy and reliability, the creation of exact, reproducible and well maintained international standards, especially of length and mass, became an increasing concern of the natural philosophers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This movement, cooperating with a corresponding impulse in governing circles for the reform of weights and measures for the benefit of society and trade, culminated in late eighteenth century France in the metric system. It established not only an exact, rational and international system of measuring length, area, volume and mass, but introduced a similar standard for temperature within the scientific community. It stimulated a wider concern within science to establish all scientific units with equal rigour, basing them wherever possible on the newly established metric units (and on the older exact units of time and angular measurement), because of their accuracy, stability and international availability. This process gradually brought about a profound change in the notation and interpretation of the mathematical formalism of physics: it brought about, for the first time in the history of the mathematical sciences, a true union of mathematics and measurement.”

As it was in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for physics, so it has also been in the twentieth and twenty-first for the psychosocial sciences. The creation of exact, reproducible and well maintained international standards is a matter of increasing concern today for the roles they will play in education, health care, the work place, business intelligence, and the economy at large.

As the economic crises persist and perhaps worsen, demand for common product definitions and for interpretable, meaningful measures of impacts and outcomes in education, health care, social services, environmental management, etc. will reach a crescendo. We need an exact, rational and international system of measuring literacy, numeracy, health, motivations, quality of life, community cohesion, and environmental quality, and we needed it fifty years ago. We need to reinvigorate and revive a wider concern across the sciences to establish all scientific units with equal rigor, and to have all measures used in research and practice based wherever possible on consensus standard metrics valued for their accuracy, stability and availability. We need to replicate in the psychosocial sciences the profound change in the notation and interpretation of the mathematical formalism of physics that occurred in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. We need to extend the true union of mathematics and measurement from physics to the psychosocial sciences.

Previous posts in this blog speak to the persistent invariance and objectivity exhibited by many of the constructs measured using ability tests, attitude surveys, performance assessments, etc. A question previously raised in this blog concerning the reproductive logic of living meaning deserves more attention, and can be productively explored in terms of complex adaptive functionality.

In a hierarchy of reasons why mathematically rigorous measurement is valuable, few are closer to the top of the list than facilitating the spontaneous self-organization of networks of agents and actors (Latour, 1987). The conception, gestation, birthing, and nurturing of complex adaptive systems constitute a reproductive logic for sociocultural traditions. Scientific traditions, in particular, form mature self-identities via a mutually implied subject-object relation absorbed into the flow of a dialectical give and take, just as economic systems do.

Complex adaptive systems establish the reproductive viability of their offspring and the coherence of an ecological web of meaningful relationships by means of this dialectic. Taylor (2003, pp. 166-8) describes the five moments in the formation and operation of complex adaptive systems, which must be able

• to identify regularities and patterns in the flow of matter, energy, and information (MEI) in the environment (business, social, economic, natural, etc.);
• to produce condensed schematic representations of these regularities so they can be identified as the same if they are repeated;
• to form reproductively interchangeable variants of these representations;
• to succeed reproductively by means of the accuracy and reliability of the representations’ predictions of regularities in the MEI data flow; and
• adaptively modify and reorganize representations by means of informational feedback from the environment.

All living systems, from bacteria and viruses to plants and animals to languages and cultures, are complex adaptive systems characterized by these five features.

In the history of science, technologically-embodied measurement facilitates complex adaptive systems of various kinds. That history can be used as a basis for a meta-theoretical perspective on what measurement must look like in the social and human sciences. Each of Taylor’s five moments in the formation and operation of complex adaptive systems describes a capacity of measurement systems, in that:

• data flow regularities are captured in initial, provisional instrument calibrations;
• condensed local schematic representations are formed when an instrument’s calibrations are anchored at repeatedly observed, invariant values;
• interchangeable nonlocal versions of these invariances are created by means of instrument equating, item banking, metrological networks, and selective, tailored, adaptive instrument administration;
• measures read off inaccurate and unreliable instruments will not support successful reproduction of the data flow regularity, but accurate and reliable instruments calibrated in a shared common unit provide a reference standard metric that enhances communication and reproduces the common voice and shared identity of the research community; and
• consistently inconsistent anomalous observations provide feedback suggesting new possibilities for as yet unrecognized data flow regularities that might be captured in new calibrations.

Measurement in the social sciences is in the process of extending this functionality into practical applications in business, education, health care, government, and elsewhere. Over the course of the last 50 years, measurement research and practice has already iterated many times through these five moments. In the coming years, a new critical mass will be reached in this process, systematically bringing about scale-of-magnitude improvements in the efficiency of intangible assets markets.

How? What does a “data flow regularity” look like? How is it condensed into a a schematic and used to calibrate an instrument? How are local schematics combined together in a pattern used to recognize new instances of themselves? More specifically, how might enterprise resource planning (ERP) software (such as SAP, Oracle, or PeopleSoft) simultaneously provide both the structure needed to support meaningful comparisons and the flexibility needed for good fit with the dynamic complexity of adaptive and generative self-organizing systems?

Prior work in this area proposes a dual-core, loosely coupled organization using ERP software to build social and intellectual capital, instead of using it as an IT solution addressing organizational inefficiencies (Lengnick-Hall, Lengnick-Hall, & Abdinnour-Helm, 2004). The adaptive and generative functionality (Stenner & Stone, 2003) provided by probabilistic measurement models (Rasch, 1960; Andrich, 2002, 2004; Bond & Fox, 2007; Wilson, 2005; Wright, 1977, 1999) makes it possible to model intra- and inter-organizational interoperability (Weichhart, Feiner, & Stary, 2010) at the same time that social and intellectual capital resources are augmented.

Actor/agent network theory has emerged from social and historical studies of the shared and competing moral, economic, political, and mathematical values disseminated by scientists and technicians in a variety of different successful and failed areas of research (Latour, 2005). The resulting sociohistorical descriptions ought be translated into a practical program for reproducing successful research programs. A metasystem for complex adaptive systems of research is implied in what Roche (1998) calls a “true union of mathematics and measurement.”

Complex adaptive systems are effectively constituted of such a union, even if, in nature, the mathematical character of the data flows and calibrations remains virtual. Probabilistic conjoint models for fundamental measurement are poised to extend this functionality into the human sciences. Though few, if any, have framed the situation in these terms, these and other questions are being explored, explicitly and implicitly, by hundreds of researchers in dozens of fields as they employ unidimensional models for measurement in their investigations.

If so, might then we be on the verge of a yet another new reading and writing of Galileo’s “book of nature,” this time restoring the “loss of meaning for life” suffered in Galileo’s “fateful omission” of the means by which nature came to be understood mathematically (Husserl, 1970)? The elements of a comprehensive, mathematical, and experimental design science of living systems appear on the verge of providing a saturated solution—or better, a nonequilbrium thermodynamic solution—to some of the infamous shortcomings of modern, Enlightenment science. The unity of science may yet be a reality, though not via the reductionist program envisioned by the positivists.

Some 50 years ago, Marshall McLuhan popularized the expression, “The medium is the message.” The special value quantitative measurement in the history of science does not stem from the mere use of number. Instruments are media on which nature, human or other, inscribes legible messages. A renewal of the true union of mathematics and measurement in the context of intangible assets will lead to a new cultural, scientific, and economic renaissance. As Thomas Kuhn (1977, p. 221) wrote,

“The full and intimate quantification of any science is a consummation devoutly to be wished. Nevertheless, it is not a consummation that can effectively be sought by measuring. As in individual development, so in the scientific group, maturity comes most surely to those who know how to wait.”

Given that we have strong indications of how full and intimate quantification consummates a true union of mathematics and measurement, the time for waiting is now past, and the time to act has come. See prior blog posts here for suggestions on an Intangible Assets Metric System, for resources on methods and research, for other philosophical ruminations, and more. This post is based on work presented at Rasch meetings several years ago (Fisher, 2006a, 2006b).

References

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), 325-59.

Andrich, D. (2004, January). Controversy and the Rasch model: A characteristic of incompatible paradigms? Medical Care, 42(1), I-7–I-16.

Bond, T., & Fox, C. (2007). Applying the Rasch model: Fundamental measurement in the human sciences, 2d edition. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2006a, Friday, April 28). Complex adaptive functionality via measurement. Presented at the Midwest Objective Measurement Seminar, M. Lunz (Organizer), University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fisher, W. P., Jr. (2006b, June 27-9). Measurement and complex adaptive functionality. Presented at the Pacific Rim Objective Measurement Symposium, T. Bond & M. Wu (Organizers), The Hong Kong Institute of Education, Hong Kong.

Husserl, E. (1970). The crisis of European sciences and transcendental phenomenology: An introduction to phenomenological philosophy (D. Carr, Trans.). Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press (Original work published 1954).

Kuhn, T. S. (1977). The function of measurement in modern physical science. In T. S. Kuhn, The essential tension: Selected studies in scientific tradition and change (pp. 178-224). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [(Reprinted from Kuhn, T. S. (1961). Isis, 52(168), 161-193.]

Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-network-theory. (Clarendon Lectures in Management Studies). Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.

Lengnick-Hall, C. A., Lengnick-Hall, M. L., & Abdinnour-Helm, S. (2004). The role of social and intellectual capital in achieving competitive advantage through enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Journal of Engineering Technology Management, 21, 307-330.

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.

Roche, J. (1998). The mathematics of measurement: A critical history. London: The Athlone Press.

Stenner, A. J., & Stone, M. (2003). Item specification vs. item banking. Rasch Measurement Transactions, 17(3), 929-30 [http://www.rasch.org/rmt/rmt173a.htm].

Taylor, M. C. (2003). The moment of complexity: Emerging network culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Weichhart, G., Feiner, T., & Stary, C. (2010). Implementing organisational interoperability–The SUddEN approach. Computers in Industry, 61, 152-160.

Wilson, M. (2005). Constructing measures: An item response modeling approach. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wright, B. D. (1977). Solving measurement problems with the Rasch model. Journal of Educational Measurement, 14(2), 97-116 [http://www.rasch.org/memo42.htm].

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

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.

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.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.livingcapitalmetrics.com.