Essay by Matt Duffy: “James C. Scott writes in Seeing Like a State that governance requires simplification and compression to understand the facts of its world. It generates reductive artifacts that enable the state to grasp what it is governing. They are important proxies for local and tacit knowledge. If a state measures grain production and grain stores, they don’t need to understand how to work the land. The measures are a compressed but manageable proxy for productivity, land value, worker skill, and more.
“Data-driven” governance is not new. Rome ran censuses, tracked taxable property, and knew who was eligible for conscription. Ultimately, every civilization is data-driven. What changes is the algorithm that processes the data. Sometimes it’s the local chief’s gut instinct. Sometimes a massive bureaucracy synthesizing reports and modern data streams into executive action.
And in every society, the leaders processing that data are ultimately beholden to sentiment. Sentiment is not necessarily opinion polls, it’s the actual mood of the citizenry. It’s obvious in a democracy, but Hume tells us it’s true of autocracy as well. Viktor Orbán just lost an election in Hungary despite sixteen years of tilting the playing field in his favor. Scott Alexander recently made the point clearly: modern autocrats calibrate fraud, coercion, and institutional meddling to what the public and key elites will bear. Sentiment is the ceiling every ruler operates under. It’s also incredibly difficult to measure directly, which is why governments build elaborate information channels to approximate it. They track resources, behaviors, and a suite of outcomes as proxies for the mood that ultimately determines their legitimacy.
But despite every government’s great efforts to process information that converts into effective action, every great society has eventually declined. There are other causes, but one driver, consistently, is that every declining society loses some connection with and control over its citizenry. Formalized information channels fail. Governments falter when information is corrupted. This is easiest to see at the level of metrics, our consistent, repeatable measurements of what’s happening in the world. Every metric has something like a half-life. From the moment a metric is adopted, its relationship with the underlying condition it seeks to quantify erodes.
Formalization of a metric generates a new world condition. It alters incentives, changing the behavior of the people within the process it is measuring. It narrows the focus of governments and other organizations, to the detriment of other information that could be considered. And once a metric starts decaying, it is impossible to right the ship without redefining the metric or adopting a new one entirely. Such adjustments happen, but generally institutions are slow to make these changes, often in order to keep longitudinal comparisons in force…(More)”.
