The Seven Moral Hazards of Measurements

Exact measurements of the wrong things can drive out good judgments of the right things, imperiling our future.

The illusion of certainty in our measurements creates—to borrow an important concept from the insurance industry—a moral hazard. If people are insured, they may just act carelessly and cause the very thing they are insured against.

Fire insurance causes arson; unemployment insurance allows people to not be as diligent in finding a job; life insurance causes suicide, or worse, murder; auto insurance can cause reckless driving.

Our current cult of calculation, perpetuated by the infamous McKinsey maxim—"What you can measure you can manage"—creates the same type of risk, offering today’s business executives the illusion of control and mastery of knowledge.

It allows them to substitute statistics for thinking. It gives them a false sense of security where there should exist more doubt.

Taking into account the following seven moral hazards of measures may assist executives in avoiding putting efficiency ahead of effectiveness.

The Seven Moral Hazards of Measurements

Moral Hazard 1: We Can Count Consumers, But Not Individuals

Because benefits and costs are inherently personal and subjective, aggregation misses the individual. We can measure the objective temperature in a room at 70 degrees, but any one person may feel either warm or cold, and the differences cannot be used to cancel each other out.

We simply cannot mathematically manipulate people.

Moral Hazard 2: You Change What You Measure

Scientists call it Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which applies to all measures: that the observer in a scientific experiment affects the result.

Central bankers call it Goodhart’s law: Any target that is set quickly loses its meaning as it comes to be manipulated.

People will always find ways to make their numerical targets, even if it leads them to ineffective or, sometimes, unethical behavior.

Moral Hazard 3: Measures Crowd Out Intuition and Insight

Once a measure becomes entrenched as part of the conventional wisdom, it is usually impenetrable to logic, intuition, critical thinking, or better ways to do something.

If you have ever been bribed off an oversold airplane—with a free flight voucher, upgrade, or airline money equivalent—you have the late economist Julian Simon to thank.

Until 1978 travelers were bumped off overbooked planes rather capriciously and this caused enormous amounts of customer complaints and ill will.

But the measures didn’t help solve the problem—that took an outsider with a theory.

Simon did not analyze countless numbers and statistics, but used his intuition to solve a quite vexing problem.

Moral Hazard 4: Measures Are Unreliable

A country’s per capita gross domestic product increases when a sheep is born but decreases when a child is; and divorce actually increases the GDP since almost two of every commodity must now be purchased rather than just one.

Yet these measures mask the joy of a child and the agony of divorce.

Why would we want to put so much faith in these numbers? Picasso once said, “Art is a lie that tells the truth.” It seems in some instances, measurements are truths that tell lies.

Moral Hazard 5: The More We Measure the Less We Can Compare

Engage in this gedanken: You (or a loved one) need(s) heart surgery. You talk to nurses, friends, and other people you trust and respect, and two surgeons are consistently recommended to you.

You go online to do some research on these two practitioners and discover their mortality rates (i.e., the risk of dying from surgery): surgeon A = 65 percent; surgeon B = 25 percent. Which surgeon would you choose?

I have conducted this gedanken in seminars attended by various educated professionals—who certainly have taken a statistic class or two—and, astonishingly, the overwhelming majority select surgeon B.

But wouldn’t you want to know what type of patients the two doctors serve? What if surgeon A takes a disproportionate share of hard cases and thus has a higher failure rate? He or she just may be the better surgeon.

The point is, we simply do not know without gathering more information, both quantitative and qualitative, and making further judgments based on our own risk profile.

Seeing the two numbers side by side seems, though, to give people a false sense of precision and, in this case, could lead to a deadly decision.

Moral Hazard 6: The More Intellectual the Capital, the Less You Can Measure It

Ideas only come from sentient beings, not inanimate objects or pets.

Since approximately 75 percent of any country’s wealth-creating capacity resides in its human capital, how could it be otherwise?

To complicate matters, a lot of that knowledge is tacit, which is hard to capture in spreadsheets and pie charts.

We may be able to count the physical assets of Google or Apple, but traditional accounting pays no attention to its human capital, what has been labeled the “invisible balance sheet.”

Traditional book value accounting—assets minus liabilities equals equity—can only explain about one-sixth of the value of the market capitalization on the nation’s stock markets.

Accountants call the difference between market value and book value goodwill; but that is just a label for their ignorance.

Moral Hazard 7: Measures Are Lagging

Imagine driving your car with your dashboard gauges informing you of last month’s speed, fuel level, temperature, oil pressure, RPMs, and the rest.

This is precisely the status of accounting information: it is like timing your cookies with a smoke alarm. It’s a lagging indicator, informing us where we have been, never where we are going.

The Future Cannot be Measured

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote: “Life is lived forward but understood backward.”

Certainly measures help us reflect on past events and aid us in improving our theories.

But they can never take the place of dreams, imagination, passion, and the spirit of enterprise where entrepreneurs toil and struggle to create our future.

No measure is capable of capturing the richness of free minds operating in free markets dreaming of better ways to improve our future, and it is folly to believe otherwise.

It may even lead us into moral hazards, or a world where we are so preoccupied about measuring past performance we do not take the time to dream about the future.