Excerpts from an article relating to a number of recent threads:
DAVID BOYLE NEW STATESMAN - "It may work fine in practice," goes a joke
that the French make at their own expense. "The trouble is, it just
doesn't work in theory." So it is strange that Paris has become the
birthplace of a revolt against the pre-eminence of theory over practice,
of economic abstraction over reality, and statistics over real life.
Could this episode prove the beginning of the end for the whole cult of
measurement, statistics, targets and indicators that has become such a
feature of modern life, not just in the Blair government, but around the
world?
- we have been plunged into what Professor Michael Power of the London
School of Economics calls "the audit culture . . . a gigantic experiment
in public management." We can see the results everywhere. The government
introduced about 8,000 targets or numerical indicators of success during
its first term of office. We have NHS targets, school league tables,
environmental indicators - 150 of them at last count - and measurements
covering almost every area of professional life or government, all in
the name of openness, accountability and democracy.
A friend of mine with a hefty government grant, negotiating with civil
servants over his annual targets, tells me he quoted the old Scottish
proverb: "You don't make sheep any fatter by weighing them." They looked
at him with complete incomprehension. There is clearly a long way to go.