Not just a cog in a machine

You get what you pay for. And conversely, you don't get what you don't pay for. Over the past 30 years, our society has increasingly moved toward management and resource allocation systems that set up measures and use those to evaluate people and processes. The result has been to reduce the service offered to only those activities aligned with the measures. As measures increase -- and those resistant to the agenda, who pull down the scores, are driven out -- there is much celebration and slapping of backs. But something is being lost.

It's often hard to identify what was lost -- precisely because it was something that wasn't being measured. But I think that, over the next generation, we're going to discover how much poorer our environment is because of all of these resources or amenities that we used to take for granted but which now are gone, simply because they're hard to quantify and measure.

We're seeing this in the teaching profession, where teaching is being treated, not as an empowered person building a culture of learning among students, but instead as a functionary monitoring low-status workers and being rewarded for "keeping them on task". It doesn't matter whether test-scores go up: we're destroying the teaching profession and graduating a generation of students who have never learned to take responsibility for their own learning.

One example, I've seen talked about, which falls into this category is "loyalty". Charlie Stross wrote eloquently how in building a cadre of professionals, the government used to manage explicitly to help maintain loyalty, but that the next generation of spy kids has been treated much more as disposable contractors -- and that Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden are the beginnings of that decisionmaking coming home to roost.

Another example is the appalling architecture in public spaces. James Howard Kunstler has written extensively how zoning and cost cutting have led many buildings to expose blank walls and created soul-sucking areas all around themselves because, from a purely cost/rule driven standpoint, there's no reward for creating an enriching public sphere.

I feel personally invested in the issue because of the kind of work I do. I've often seen myself as a catalyst in my roles supporting faculty and students: the work I do often doesn't have a direct product, but it enables others to be productive. This is another example of the kind of work that can get overlooked or feel unrewarded, because it isn't something that gets directly measured. I remember a chairman who, after he took over, looked at me and said, "What do you do, anyway?" That was rather chilling. Luckily there were a number of faculty around the department who were willing to explain to him how important I was to their ability to do their work. But it's something I worry about.

A counterveiling trend has sprung up, toward local and artisanal poducts and labor. Given how robots are replacing human labor, though, unless robots can be programming to buy artisanal, it may be a losing proposition.