What We Can and Cannot Measure

We are entering a period of the debate over metrics. What are we able to measure? Can we measure the important things? Or do we just grade circumstances using as criteria what we can measure --which may not be representative--and ignore the rest?

Brooks wrote recently on Stephen Pinker's new book, Enlightenment Now: "The big problem with his rationalistic worldview is that while he charts the way individuals have benefited over the centuries, he spends barely any time on the quality of the relationships between individuals.

That is to say, Pinker doesn’t spend much time on the decline of social trust, the breakdown of family life, the polarization of national life, the spread of tribal mentalities, the rise of narcissism, the decline of social capital, the rising alienation from institutions or the decline of citizenship and neighborliness. It’s simply impossible to tell any good-news story when looking at the data from these moral, social and emotional spheres."

Quality. Social Trust. Tribalism. Neighborliness. These are big topics and it is difficult to measure them. Worse, exactly whose responsibilities are all these things? Worst, a lot of sociological evidence exists that suggests people are most fulfilled, trusting and bonding when under severe stress, like war.

In this new book, Pinker criticizes a 1962 response to C.P. Snow's case for the importance of science. The response is by literary critic F.R. Leavis.
Pinker writes:

Leavis scoffed at a value system in which "'standard of living' is the ultimate criterion, its raising an ultimate aim." As an alternative, he suggested that "in coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for--what ultimately for? What do men live by?--the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling." (Anyone whose "depth of thought and feeling" extends to a woman in a poor country who has lived to see her newborn because her standard of living has risen, and then multiplied that sympathy by a few hundred million, might wonder why "coming to terms with great literature" is morally superior to "raising the standard of living" as a criterion for "what at bottom we really believe"--or why the two should be seen as alternatives in the first place.)