I love it when I find something, online or in a journal, and I think, “THAT is what I’m going to show to my students!”
Especially if I know that it’s going to give me license to say (or at least think in my head), “I was right!”
Every year, my advanced policy students have to do a social problem and social indicator paper. They like the social problem piece just fine; it’s a pretty standard problem analysis and, certainly, there is no shortage of interesting social problems they can study.
But the social indicator piece usually trips them up, because I ask them to really think about how we know what we think we know about a given problem and that, well, gets a little confusing.
I prod them to think about the ways in which the definitions and measurements we use to understand social problems distort them, and how those distortions can be problematic when it comes to trying to solve the problems. I use the example of unemployment, often, to get them thinking about how our definition of ‘unemployed’ (not working and actively looking for work) doesn’t capture nearly all of those who would consider themselves ‘unemployed’. The same is true, certainly, for our definition of ‘homeless’. Many of those technically defined as ‘obese’ today don’t consider themselves such. And we could go on and on. There are areas where we don’t track nearly the entire scope of a problem (child abuse and sexual assault are particularly under-captured), and other problems that we don’t try to measure at all, really (until fairly recently, we didn’t measure asset poverty, for example, or wealth inequality).
And what we measure matters, I tell them, so, together, we study not only what we know about the problem, but what we really should know, in order to have the best chance of harnessing our social policies to fix it.
Enter Beth Kanter’s post about social media within nonprofit organizations, where she makes the point that, when it comes to metrics of engagement and reach of social media efforts, “what gets measured gets better”.
When organizations see, visually, that their emails are mostly going unopened or their advocacy alerts result in bounce-offs their website, they tend to be motivated to do something about it. When they see that their Facebook connections have been flat for months, they institute strategies to improve.
Measuring matters.
Which is the whole point of the social indicator assignment, and of my stressing to students that we have to pay attention to what we’re measuring–and how–and what we’re not, because that understanding (and lack thereof) is key to why we are and are not comparatively successful in solving the problem.
If what gets measured gets better, what should we be measuring–or, at least, measuring better–to give ourselves the best tools with which to combat the problem? How can pushing for data, sometimes, be the catalyst for bringing about change (think about progress around racially-motivated policing practices)?
And what should we be measuring, within our organizations (client satisfaction, recidivism, impact), in order to model what we want to see in social policy and to hone in on the areas of our own work that need improvement?
What gets measured gets…better. So let’s get measuring.
Classroom to Capitol 
A better measure for a better system
How should we measure ‘well-being’?
One of my intellectual interests relates to how evaluation and social indicators can focus our collective attention on the problems that need to be addressed, setting better benchmarks toward which we should aspire.
And one of my great passions is around reducing political, economic, and social inequality, to build toward a more just future.
And, here, these two worlds align.
Because we need some better measures of how we’re doing.
I don’t mean the U.S. poverty line, although clearly that needs to be revamped.
But, here, I’m thinking more of the underlying issue, not poverty but what creates the conditions for it.
We need a better measure than Gross Domestic Product per capita, because, clearly, an increase in GDP doesn’t always translate to an increase in well-being.
Look at how much more we spend on incarceration today, which is tied to an increase in GDP, when it’s clear that people aren’t benefiting from that particular outlay.
We have the Gini coefficient, which measures inequality, although, perhaps not surprisingly, it doesn’t hold much cachet with policymakers or even pundits in the U.S.
Something like the 20/20 ratio, which compares how well the bottom 20% are doing, compared to the top 20%, would be even more helpful, I think.
Or the Hoover index, which calculates how much redistribution would be needed to achieve total equality.
I’m certainly no economist–or mathematician–but an indicator that could clearly indicate a person’s likelihood of leaving poverty, or leaving the bottom 20% or so, could, if inserted into our understanding about our economic system, help to crack the myth of ‘rags to riches’.
So why do we use GDP per capita, when it so clearly fails to capture so much of what we really need to know, and distorts so much of the picture?
There are better measures out there, and we certainly have the technical capacity to shift to them, or even to develop something else, if we really wanted.
I can only conclude that our stubborn clinging to something woefully inadequate has much to do with how we come out looking relatively good according to that measure, and pretty blatantly unequal according to others.
If we’re not winning, after all, we can always move the goalposts.
But I think that, while metrics are surely not everything, having better measures would really help.
You manage to what you measure, after all, and, if we had some consensus about what we were working toward, we’d at least have a shot at getting there.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary
Tagged evaluation, inequality, poverty, social indicators