Sociopathic metrics

It still amazes me how badly metrics are thought out and used. I have railed for years against Mickey Mouse micro-objectives. The problem is that the metrics our governments use are invariably too narrow and short term. It seems that they are chosen because:

• they sound good,
• they are easy to collect,
• they take, as given, current ways of doing things, and
• they take, as given, current institutional structures and responsibilities.

The result though, is even more concisely stated:

• they are useless, or worse.

Useless, in the sense that they do not target outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Worse in that...well, let US writer Matt Taibbi give examples from policing:

In the same way our army in Vietnam got in trouble when it started searching for ways to quantify the success of its occupation, choosing sociopathic metrics like “body counts” and “truck kills,” modern big-​city policing has been corrupted by its lust for summonses, stops, and arrests. It’s made monsters where none needed to exist.Where did policing go wrong?, Matt Taibbi, 2 June

There's no coherence about the construction of such metrics because I suspect, little thought goes into them. Government has become adept at obscuring the policymaking process so that even its stated goals don't work, and its unstated goals go unexamined and unexaminable by anybody other than wealthy interests or the people they employ to follow and influence the process on their behalf.

Social Policy Bonds might not seem the obvious solution to the serious problems this policymaking process has created: a widening gap between government and ordinary citizens, growing levels of inequality and growing cynicism. But, as I have said more fully here, they would impose one discipline that is as essential as it's currently evaded, and that is to agree on broad, long-term, social and environmental goals. We are seeing the result of sociopathic metrics and the arcane policymaking process that has led to their creation; not just in riots and mayhem, but in heightened levels of cynicism and despair. Politics and policymaking have become the ultimate closed shop, closed to ordinary people because we just don't understand it. It's time to open it up and the first step is to ask, not tell, all of us what are our policy priorities?