This piece originally appeared in the IPA Review.

Before coming to the IPA, I had a small role in a Victorian Education Department team implementing Gonski school reforms. The department developed school performance targets and a reforms package that would, among other things, help schools identify their strengths and weaknesses. To what extent would the reforms move schools closer to the targets, the minister’s office asked? So we then had to somehow score the reforms against the targets, and estimate how much progress would be provided by funding.

The folly of such exercises is well-captured in Jerry Z. Muller’s The Tyranny of Metrics, released last year. Muller, an historian at the Catholic University of America, argues that metric fixation has overrun bureaucracies, public and private, distorting their behaviour and ultimately frustrating their purposes. Metric fixation replaces experience and discretion with institutional targets and measures, argues that all inputs and outputs should be reported (transparent), and connects rewards and penalties to performance against metrics. The result is that institutions pursue only their most obvious and measurable tasks, leading to the corruption of their internal information flows and ultimately to waste and inefficiency. Muller observes that “measurement may become counterproductive when it tries to measure the unmeasurable and quantify the unquantifiable”.

Not all metrics are useless. Muller notes accurate measurement against readily identifiable ends is desirable when possible. The trick is to distinguish between good and bad uses. To this end, he dedicates the bulk of the book to case studies taken from across society, demonstrating the problem is not limited to the public sphere. Businesses and charities have been just as charmed by made-up numbers and phony rigour as schools, universities, medicine, policing, and the military.

This piece, an interview with John Carroll by me and Scott Hargreaves, originally appeared in the IPA Review.

The growing vibrancy of Sydney and Melbourne will keep underwriting Australia’s growing prosperity well into the 21st century, provided bureaucrats don’t strangle our cities with red tape.

So says John Carroll, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at La Trobe University, and author of 11 books on Australian culture. His latest, Land of the Golden Cities: Australia’s Exceptional Prosperity & the Culture That Made It, was launched by the IPA’s executive director John Roskam in Brisbane.

Editor of the IPA Review Scott Hargreaves (SH) and Research Fellow Andrew Bushnell (AB) interviewed Carroll (JC) to delve deeper into his insights about Australia’s prosperity and cultural identity.

AB: The country that famously rode the sheep’s back now rises on its special talent for vibrant metropolitanism. Why have our cities become so important, and what brought you to write Land of the Golden Cities?

JC:I’ve lived most of my life in Australia, and I like the place. This is an act of gratitude and tribute through a reflection on what makes the place tick. I’ve spent my professional life as a sociologist thinking about how people find meaning in their lives, or don’t, and what holds societies together. That converged with my grand ambition to ask what makes Australian society work, what are its key ingredients?