[Bill Gates’s] speeches, interviews, annual letters for his foundation, and op-eds—often replete with graphs and references to data—repeatedly demonstrated a self-professed “maniacal focus on…measuring results.” In many cases, measurable impact takes the lead as Gates jumps between disparate issues ranging from elementary education in the United States to antiviral medications in Burkina Faso. The connection? Both involve workers delivering well-studied interventions that advance well-defined outcomes. Measurable at every step. Reading these arguments, one quickly gets the impression that Gates’s understanding of reality is almost wholly quantitative.
And while Gates’s quantification often appears as a means to an end, there are times when he seems fixated on measurement as an end in itself. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gates muses:
If I could wave a wand, I’d love to have a way to measure how exposure to risks like disease, infection, malnutrition and problem pregnancies impact children’s potential—their ability to learn and contribute to society.
It’s a revealing bit of text: If Gates had a magic wand, he’d collect data.
And while some hoped the turn toward metrics would restore confidence in civic organizations and inspire renewed engagement in community life, it seems to have had the opposite effect. Rather than getting involved ourselves, we look to data-savvy intermediaries to tell us what we should care about and how we should give. In other words, our fixation on quantification isn’t just the product of a civil society in decline; it has also helped to accelerate that decline by supplanting the ideal of hands-on community engagement with the ideal of unsentimental calculation.
In the world of measurable impact, the communitarian ethos is eroded by atomistic consumerism wherein civic-minded individuals are tasked with comparison shopping for deals on progress. (Tellingly, CharityNavigator’s website displays a shopping cart in the top right corner, just like any other e-commerce site.) The diminished ideal is one where people bump into each other, encounter unfamiliar perspectives, and relinquish parochialisms. They form into groups, forge coalitions across differences, and exercise political influence. While it’s true that this romantic vision of civil society has never been fully realized, it’s also true that, on the barren landscape of measurable impact, these features are not even acknowledged.