Measures as meta and their economic impact
Recently I keep seeing variations of the same theme pop up around the web: that in a complicated world, we have to try to simplify things by using easily stated and compared measures; but that these same measures tend to distort things, since they sometimes become more important than the reality they purport to represent in the first place.
A great example is GDP, recently dubbed “Grossly Distorted Picture” by the Economist (subscription required, unfortunately). GDP is a very limited and inaccurate measure of economic activity, let alone national well-being. In fact, GDP was initially created to just be a planning tool for wartime production in WWII. But nevertheless, boosting GDP has become a central goal of many countries, which sometimes can lead to strange distortions.
Another example is Alexa’s measure of pageviews to a web site, which has become an easy way to gauge the “success” of a site. But as Alex Castro points out, this measure is in some ways even worse than GDP. Not only can a site attract lots of pageviews without doing anything useful for users, but sites that use AJAX, Flash, or other modern technologies are perceived as less successful because of the fewer page views they generate.
The need to simplify isn’t going anywhere, and so neither are measures and their problems; but it seems worth keeping in mind that any given simplification might be hiding important details, and that it might be worth taking a closer look before drawing any conclusions.