The Misuse of Numbers: Audits, Quantification, and the Obfuscation of Politics
The Misuse of Numbers: Audits, Quantification, and the Obfuscation of Politics
Mass democracies such as the United States that have embraced meritocratic criteria for elite selection and mass opportunity are tempted to develop impersonal, objective, mechanical measures of quality. The seductiveness of such measures is that they all turn measures of quality into measures of quantity, thereby allowing comparison across cases with a single metric. Whether they take the form of the Social Science Citation Index, the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), or cost-benefit analysis (CBA), they all follow the same logic. This chapter sketches that logic and argues that it is irremediably and fatally flawed.
Keywords: democracy, meritocracy, quality, quantity
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