Professor explaining why when i was in college, what i wanted to major in like most kids do and i was torn between going into science and going into the humanities. I found those questions more interesting, engaging, and urgent. My First Political science course, we read the great political philosophers from plato on up. They were all asking the question, what is justice, what is good government, how can you organize government and society to make life better for people, to make justice . So before i decided to become a Political Science major, i already have lack of confidence, and social scientists, and i got good grades in science and math courses. I took a Political Science course and didnt remember the paper, you never remember is that stuff. You remember the nasty comments. This is a credible effort but never be a political scientist. I remember myself, a similar dilemma, slightly different reaction, one of the things i realized in middle school, talking about manifest destiny, is this a thing we should be leave . From the perspective of native americans across the country, this is not at all a reasonable theory. When i approved something i can be comfortable with that. The discomfort overwhelmed my interest but my interest was there and for you it was the opposite. I had a discomfort moment with numbers which led to this book. When i took the first economics course, and graphs on the board of supply and demand, what a beautiful model the market was, people buy things depending on the price, the price is right, a buyer wants to buy it until it wants to sell, it makes everybody happy. I raised my hand and said price is not the only thing people think about when they decide whether to buy something and the professor said that too. We can really get some powerful conclusions by stripping away the extraneous stuff. Thank you for that story. I took economics in th college, f the same reason. Too many assumptions, pure mathematics, that is fine. Th you make a logical inference. But the first bookish question was since i read your booki have been thinki through a lot the idea when we count things, i will repeat what you said, to classify them, strip them of context and that is something that was a deeply human thing. It ia metaphor. That is the key point of my book and we are taught in scho even by a parent, the right answer, one 23, on 2 things. You have to decide what belongs in the group of things you are counting, a parent puts do a bunch of oranges and apples, the kid has to know how to tell an applerom an orange and have tse rules beforehand. That is a simple one, easy to teach kids to tell an apple from an orange buto something mo interesting like counting ballots in aelection. You want to count votes for different caidates but someone making a decision before they count the votes, what is the valid ballot the mail in ballot, in all the right places. And who gets to cast the ballot, who is in or o, those get made before anybody starts to tally up a number of votes on the ballot. Reporter a very profound point. Figuring out two comes after one or 3 comes after 2 or one comes after 3 etc. What your book has done, the hard part is the invisible part, just asking them to categorize in the first place, reminds me of one of my favorite conundrums to come up with as a teenager, when you say hi to a piece of broccoli, at the end, and that is the same thing, what is an individual in this context. That is what we are always asng our sons and daughters to do in this category. It is important. Anotheexample, looking up this a lot, from his perspective, people think the tax calculation is hard, it is easy once you decide what counts as income. This doesnt count or this doesnt get rid of this or admit your income, what doesnt belong, negotiation what we are constantly doing, the important point i came to this insight, thinking about these numbers for a long time. I want to see how kids learn to count. That moment, i thought i remembered it, red fish blue fish, black fish blue fish, it goes on and on and never gets past too. Another person, the fastest blowfish, not one of them is like another. Dont ask us why, go ask your mother. Then i thought if one is like another, how do you know that . How do you count them all as fish. As only humans we need to group things, to think about things. When we look at his words, the word for nose, my nose, mom and dads knows, dogs knows, they dont look anything alike and babys knows doesnt look like my nose. They have certain similarities meaningful to us. We want them all under one word, another language for categorizing things. The question, and we had unbelievable power, you talk about that brilliantly with respect the system whereby people are asked to measure their own pain. What does it mea to measure ones pain. Anything thatauses pain as a doctor or nurse, they think one is highly noticeable and 10 is st people, are completely baffled by this question. Wexperience it, we dont experience it like a thermometer. What i found interesting, i asked lots of friends when they were writing this book, everybody says they find it difficult to put their pain, medical system keeps using , pain is not communicable. No o else can feel yr pain. It w one of those experiences that is yours and yours alone. The canadian doctor who came over, a much better way of tryingo get a handle on peoples pain, it is a system of words. Listen to people talk about their pain, came up with 100 different words to characterize pain and most of the medical professions i talked to think the word system is much more helpful to allow patients to express what they feel and helping clinicians understand what they feel and some are bingo words. A person says the man t physician knows that is systic, i am making up that example. Even though i think the pain, the paincale is very problematic and frustrating for people it is one big advantage of it is a lanage that allows people to communicate a little bit. If you say my pain was 10 yesterday but only 7 now you are communicating that you feel that much better, doctor giving to some Pain Medicine and you say you are still 10. So it becomes a language of communication and it is better than nothing but not a very good one. A couple fascinating details, the pain numbers, the first one was in spite of how well the more contextual language works, building companies, Insurance Companies refer to the numbers because they want to know how much they can charge or imply there was a if pain was above 6 we should be treated for it. The doctors responsibility is to give you a pain med. That is interesting. In some sense it becomes more quantified. Guest i learned from a friend who has cancer and is on some pretty serious pain meds, that she said to me they dont want you to be about a five. I scratched my head. What does that mean . And dont want you to be they to tell you not to stay above five. No, if youre above the five that means they want to do something about it, give you meds. So then i talked to more people, and what people told me, they know, its kind of a a cat and mouse game,hese numbers. You put down a five, and they put down whatever the answer is a whatever their next card is. People who are experiencing a lot of pain often make the tradeoff themselves, because they meds make you really a zombie, it reall messes with heread and you cant think clearly, they make you tired. People who have a lot of pain sometimes think i dont want to just be doped up on opioids. Several of my friends told me that the learned that when they learned to use the scaleo control what the nurse or the doctor wld do, if they didnt want more pain meds they would say a low number. Host one of the things i learned from the book was just how much the scoring system exerted in terms of power and authority, that light if you are talking about a Public School teacher, which your book also discusses, getting their value added model store, so man of the teachers in that system, like their natural reaction was to trust the number because it was a score. Were used to trusting her scores, we have our pico, o wait, our iq score. We are supposed to trust these things and the trust isnt always deserved. Its fascinating to see an example use gave with the payment, to see the patnt, in other , in other words, the target of these scores actually taking contro its so rare. Usually the scores are power over the targets of the scores and thats a rare case where the targets take back the power. You want to talk a little bit about the teachers and the scoring system around the teachers . Guest lets talk about our first. Just to go back to the pain thing, the reason why the patient can take control because they are the ones scoring themselves. Thats unusual. In most situations somebody else scoring you. We all grew up in school being scored all the time, being given grades. We are used to being the week end of the scoring system, subject of someone elses power. Unfortunately, kids learn very early on that the teacher is right, for the grade is right and a grade will make them doubt themselves. I doubted myself when i was when i got a b and i would never be a political scientist. I dont know why i long story why i cameround to it. Yet members have this or in our culture of being objective. Theres a l of slogans nowadays to s we want to make evencebased decisions, make databased decisions. We want our disions to be driven by research, driven by facts. What people mean nowadays b facts, evidence Data Research is numbers. I think those are objective, and words are squishy and subject to interpretation, which they are. Yeah, people use scoring systems in all kinds of organizations to make decisions that are going to affect other peoples lives, whether they hire them, fire them, promote them, give them a pay raise. You talk in your book, given insurance, how much to charge them for the insurance. Whether to give them a bank loan. The example that both fascinates us about teachers is that people in education throughout bureaucracies wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and could do things results. They came up with a way to measure results, which was testing students on reading and math. Pretty much those two subjects. When students spend a year in a teachers classroom and to do well in those test, the result is contributed to the quality of the teacher. If students do well. Thats kind of a simple model of how it works but they developed fancy formulas to try to sort out exactly how much of the students test score was due to the teachers teaching and how much was due to extraneous factors what the kid had learned the year before and how good the teacher was in the previous grade was. Ost and how will he did in the past. The way i say it is, the teacher is given the credit if the student did better than expected. But that expected concept was itself a mathematical model. Guest yeah. So then in addition to scoring people, scoring teachers, the systems also either rewarded or penalize them on the basis of their score. Either they could get fired, whole schools would be shut down or taken over by Emergency Managers or whatever, put in receivership, and School Budgets will be determined by how well these teachers are performing. It could be lifeanddeath consequences, not literally, but job losing consequences for teachers who get a bad score. Its the combination of the scoring system and the attachment of rewards and penalties that leads to these consequences. Host yes. Guest the score is what i tell about in the book, is that all of us hope that education is so much more than teach people how to add and subtract and pass a reading comprehensive test or know the right grammar rules. We really hope, for my money, i really could teacher is one who instills curiosity in the students and instills excitement about learning and confidence, that they can learn to make them want to learn, give them confidence they can, and boost them. And encourage their imagination and nurture their creativity. Those are the things i want my kids i dont have kids but i want my kids to learn and it was about to learn to read and write but so much more than that. I want education to do that. The problem is these formulas for how much value the teacher adds to a students knowledge are so really nearly defined to include only these narrow parts of education that are such a small part of it. Host yes, i often say that this is like the idea of assessing the teacher with test scores is easily seen as an insufficient concept with the experiment. Weve got to go through this experiment with teachers. I guess we did do that. I want to move back to a few examples you have of like what gets counted and what doesnt get counted. I have three examples that it want you to choose one. The violence against women, what is counted when were talking about violence against women . I am partly saying three examples because of what people to realize this book is wonderful examples. The gdp, what is counted as credit production as good news for the nation or for other nations . And, of course, madisons virginia slaveholder, his calculation of what gets counted as a human with rights. Pick one of those that you would like to go through about two sort of laid down the whole point strongly, its not about the counting. Counting is easy part. What gets categorized appropriately so that we c count it later. Guest okay, okay. Its hard to choose but i think we can come back to others in another context. The u. N. Wanted to develop a way to measure gender violence in Different Countries, and had a whole bunch of committee meetings, invited people from Different Countries. What they wanted to do is set up some indicators. So say what counts as violence. Is it rape, murder . Of course those things. Is it beating up somebody . Is it taking somebody . They got some women who are from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count as gender, as violence, and they would ultimately go around and do surveys in Different Countries and as people have you experienced this or that . So that was a rape in beating and kicking and so on were the things the northern and western people came up with. Then there were some other women at one of the means and they say we have different kinds of violence in the country, throwing acid in your face, burning, setting you on fire, dropping you from high please come sticking needles under your fingernails, smashing your hands. Those are things we think of violence. They also said it was psychological violence to take another wife, take a second wife, or to berate and punish a woman for not giving birth to a male child. Those with things they considered gender violence. The committee that ultimately designed the survey with all the indicators didnt include any of those things. There you have a case where its a question of who is in the room. It comes back to power really. So who is in the room when these issues are getting made . What counts as violence . Bangladeshi women were in the room but there were not Strong Enough to get the definitions of violence, their experiences of violence counted as examples of violence. When the survey gets done, that wont be done. Host it really is about power, but we dont have time for all the questions i have some going to move ahead. I would like you to come to guess i am looking for positive stories about numbers in power, talk about numbers with witnesses in the context of Lake Michigan if you would. Guest and i just, yeah, if roy talk about that i just want to say a lot of people in the first here my message they worry im telling people never trust a number. Numbers are no good can we should not count. That is not my message at all. I think numbers can be extremely helpful and that lots of examples of it in the book. The flint, michigan, water crisis is one of them, where the city of flint switched its source of water from the detroit reservoir to the flint river, i think it was called. And shortly after that people started noticing, people in flint, that their water smelled and tasted funny and they started having some pretty serious problems. Their hairas falling out, skin rashes. Everybody knows i think it turned out there was a lot o land in the water and a lot of children had lead poisong because of drinking this water a lot of lead in the water numbers are critical whatas nding the problem was. It turned out that the epa, Environmental Protection agency, s standards for what our safe levels of lead in water, and there shouldnt be led in water, and the clean water act sai no one should be using leadipes anymore. That was 1986. But all pipes are grandfathered in. And flint, michigan, had a lot of old Housing Stock with old pipes. An then the cdc uses numbers to say how much is a safe level of lead in anybodys blood. Guest you can do host you can do a blood test. Guest cdc says no level is a safe, but above a certain level we should be concerned. Host above five we should be concerned but we dont need to treat until we are above 45 or a person is above 45. Guest what happened ishe citizens of flint invited a water engineer to come in and test the water, and he figured out right away that there was probably led in the water because of corrosion from old pipes. He tested the water and sure enough there was very high levels. By the way, michigan, department of Environmental Affairs or whatever its called had tested theater but claimed that it s host it was a come there was no le in the period the wayhey tested it, it turned ou and this water engineer discovered guest theyold residents but they sent their inspectors in. They l the water run for 30 minutes. They flushed all the lead particles out of the pipes so of course they cou low readings. At this water engineer came in and he said come he did hiswn test and he got numbershat were very, very high. And then a doctor, a pediatrician with human concerns and the mothers of her patients, and she had aess to all of those log level, blood lead testing. She worked in the hospital where it was done and she compared those blood levels with kids before the switch to the new system o water to after, and sure enough levelsent up dramatically. So those two ss of numbers put together the storyhat the water engineer made very convincing, lead pipes corrode and send parties into the water which gets intoeoples blood. Those two sets of numbers became e witnesses to condemn the citys where its change and its lack to do anything about the water. Host i still feel like the story though, because it is often the case you do find out the numbers were on your side and yet you lost, you kno there mustve been, i think the answer is i think that was good Media Coverage of this. I even heard that pediatrians be given somehow those