“Big data” and “evidence-based policy” are the dominant ideas of our moment. A May 2014 White House report put it this way: “Big data will become an historic driver of progress, helping our nation perpetuate the civic and economic dynamism that has long been its hallmark.”
The White House report presents big data as an analytically powerful set of techniques. It says the social and economic value created by big data should be balanced against “privacy and other core values of fairness, equity and autonomy.”
But the White House effort to balance the costs and benefits of big data misses the bigger picture. There are limits to the analytic power of big data and quantification that circumscribe big data’s capacity to drive progress.
Data-driven techniques are only one part of how government, industry and civil society should make important decisions. Bad use of data can be worse than no data at all. As a December 2014 New York Times Magazine story about Marissa Mayer, Yahoo’s chief executive, pointed out:
“Mayer also favored a system of quarterly performance reviews, or Q.P.R.s, that required every Yahoo employee, on every team, be ranked from 1 to 5. The system was meant to encourage hard work and weed out underperformers, but it soon produced the exact opposite. Because only so many 4s and 5s could be allotted, talented people no longer wanted to work together; strategic goals were sacrificed, as employees did not want to change projects and leave themselves open to a lower score.”
Bad use of data can be worse than no data at all.
Konstantin Kakaes
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To effectively debate public policy or corporate strategy, we will have to continue to have debates over principles. In such debates, disagreement among individuals with different ideological presuppositions will continue.
To believe that disinterested, “rigorous” quantitative judgment can be systematically substituted for such debate imperils programs and practices whose costs are direct, but whose benefits are indirect and thus more difficult to measure. Ease of measurement does not correspond with importance. The administrative apparatus of evidence generation does not, as it claims to, merely pursue “good policy” but is itself a self-interested actor pursuing particular political ends.
A December 2014 book published by the Brookings Institution, “Show Me the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy,” sums up this belief: “The vision of the evidence-based movement is that the nation will have thousands of evidence-based social programs that address each of the nation’s most important social problems and that under the onslaught of these increasingly effective programs, the nation’s social problems will at last recede.”
This grandiose vision of evidence as panacea is dangerous and damaging. Unless the evangelists of evidence are resisted, they will steamroll over what they cannot measure, leaving us poorer as individuals and as a society, buried in a bureaucracy of numbers untethered from reality.
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