Id like to start this interview by talking about you. I was talking a little more about you but i like the audience to start off honestly in your introduction. You got a note from a professor i believe saying youd never be apolitical scientist, can you talk about that . I put that in the book is i wanted to major in college and it was really torn between going into science and going into the humanities and social science and i finally decided on social science because i found those questions much more interesting and engaging and urgent for me. And in my Political Science course we read all these great political philosophers on up and they were all asking the question what is justice, what is good government, how can you organize government and organize society to make life better for people and particularly to make justice. So i ended up before i decided to become a Political Science major, i already had kind of a lack of confidence in my skills as a humanist for a social scientist because i didnt get very good grades in those courses but i got really good grades in my science and math courses. It was kind of a dilemma area. I dont even rememberwhat the paper was on it you never remember that stuff. You only remember thegrade on the nasty comments. This is an incredible effort to be a political scientist. I actually really, i remember myself as i became a mathematician but one of the reasons, i guess it was a similar dilemma, one of the things i realized in the school i believe was being selftaught about manifest destiny. And as it was like a thing that we believed and i just remember thinking from the perspective of the native americans that found their way across the country, this is not at all a reasonable theory. I justremember being like at least its geometry. But i proved something, i know i approved something and i have to be comfortable with that so i just reduce comfort somehow overwhelmed my interests but i think my interest was there and somehow for you i think it was. I think thats right. And also, i had a uncomfortable moment with what led to this book. For a long time. When i took my firsteconomics course , i remembered this professor put up these graphs on supply and demand curves and said what a beautiful model the market was because its this you believe that everybody believe that it was people buy things depending on the price. And suppliers sell things and at the point where the price is right, this the buyer wants to buy and the buyer seller wants to sell and the markets perfect and it makes everybody happy and i raise my hand and i said this isnt the onlything that people think about. And the professor said thats true but if we make a simplification, we can really reach some powerful conclusions by stripping away all the extraneous stuff and it enjoyed the heck out of me. I agree with you, thats why in college i was like, for exactly the same reason. Its just too many assumptions, i dont believe the assumptions. If they were pure mathematics , thats fine because you believe in this way anyou agree you have a strippeddown product. [inaudle] but what you just said is a sort of bookish questionwhich is i have en thinking through a lot. [inaudible] im not going to repeat what you just said but when you count things you have to strip them of context and thats something that is adeeply human thing, its something we teach our children to do. Though tell us a little bit about the process of classificaon and numbers as a metaphor. That is there key point of my book. I think that we are taught in school that and en by our parents that theres a right answer, that are just having a number word li 1 to 3, but in fact you have to decide what belongs in a group ofthings youre counting. So its a parent puts down a bunch of oranges and apples in front of the kid and says half apples. The kid has to know how that apples from an orange. They have to be taught those rules beforehand. Before they can start count so thats a simple one. Like its easy to teach kids apples and oranges but going to something more interesting , like counting ballots in a election. Somebody has to decide, youre counting votes,thats what we really want to do is count votes but somebodys making a decision before they ev count the votes. Whats a valid blot. It does this ballots me if its a mailin ballot, did you sign in all thright places and somebodys deciding whos voter. Who even gets to cast abt you whos in and whos out, these alwa get made before anybody starts to tally up the number of votes. On the balance. So. If you dont mind medoting on this for a few minutes. Its very profound point, we think of like, i have three children and we think of teaching our children to count and the way of you think you can exercise that fact and two comes after one and three comes after two. Etc. But what your book has done is really rethink that. That in fact thats the easy part. The hard part is the invisible part where were just asking to categorize. It reminds me of one of my favorite numbers that i came up with as a teenager was that when you, when you say broccoli, is it the entire stock or is it the little force at the end. I know thats ridiculous example but that kind of thing, what are these individual hierarchies of nature in this context. And thats what were always asking our sons and daughters to do is to decide what you want in this category isvery very important. Anher example that came up reading your book, im again thinking about this a lot is our, my friend is in taxes, and he does taxes and he thinks from his perspective its like people think that the tax calculation is hard but of course the tax calculation is really easy once you get into income. Just get rid of this and you have this sort of admit your income, once you have the income numbers, the taxcut deletion isreally easy. Thats a negotiation we are constantly doing but i think its a really important point. Do you want to come up with a couple more examples . I do, thats great. I kind of came to this insight when i was reading doctor rose 1626. I want to defend, ive been thinking about these numbers of such a long time but i thought i want to go back and see how whats that moment when you get the inside and i remembered it as a counting book. It starts out one fish two fish, red fishblue fish. And it goes on and on with different kinds of fish. And then theres another person who says high fish low fish. Fast fish slow fish. Not one of them is like another. Go ask your mother. And then i thought, if not one is like another, how do you know that theyre all fish. How do you count them all as fish area and we know and that made me look, everything is unique. And so its only human, we need to group things in order to make sense of our world and think about things. And when you think about it, language does the same thing when we see these words, we keep them for example, we teach them by pointingto my nose , daddys nose. Doggies nose. And my nose doesnt look anything alike and amys nose doesnt look like my nose but they have certain similarities that are meaningful to us adults. So we want them all under one word. So i really think numbers in language, numbers are just another kind of language for categorizing things. That really is a great segue to my next batch which is like,umbers are just a language, just really. We also have this unbelievable power and you talk about that brilliantly with respect to Storage Systems d with respect, i wanted youo talk about the system whereby pple are asked to measure their own pain in a medical situation. Talk about that and at does it mean to measure ones painon a scale of 1 to 10. So if wever had anything that causes pain as some doctor onurse willask you on a scale o1 to 10 , how bad is it and metimes theyll saone is highly noticeable and 10 is just i cant stand it anyre and i want to jump out awindow. And most people are baffled by this. Weont think about pain. We expernce it in a lot of different ways but we don experience it like a thermometer or with numbers. What i found interesting is i asked lots of friends about this paiscale when i was writing this book and everybody ys they find it really difficult with their painto put it in a number. Anyes yet, a medical system keeps confusing it and think it has some benefits, pain iuntenable. None else can feel your pain thats, its just one of those experiences that is yours and yours alone. Anits really impossible to indicate. So trying to do that with a number , its at least astart. Theres someone, a canadian doctor named rob morg who came over i think in a muc better way of asking people kind of maybe get a handle on peoples pain. Its a system of words and you just listen to people talk about their pain d they came up with about 100 different words, to characterize pain and most of the medical professionals i talked to say that they think their rds system is much more helpful in allowing patientsto express what they feel and helping inicians undersnd what they feel. And some words apparently are just words that a person says them and the person goes, i thats an example but even though i think the pain scale is very problematic and its frustrating for ople, its one big advantage is its a language. It allows people to communicate a little bit. So if you say my pain was a 10 yesterdaybut its seven now , youre communicating that you feel that much better. Or if a doctor gives you pai meds you say, they know to try Something Else so it becomes a language of communication and its better than nothing. Couple of fascinating details in that section about pain sufferers, its how well the more contextual, nuanced word language pertains to words. Like billing companies, Insurance Companies prefer the numbers. Its actually i think because they just want to know how much they can charge. Or maybe they, you seemed to imply there was a rule that you should be treated for it and the doctors responsibility is to give you a pain med. So thats really interesting that in some sense it becomes more this is quantified. It somehow becomes more objective from a perspective of a agency but the flipside of that is the extent to which their patients themselves learn that dave asserted control over their own treatment by deciding what to say or ask what your pain level. Can you talk about thatslip of asserting control of the patient to the system . I learned from a friend who had cancer and is on some pretty serious pain meds that she said to me they dont want you to be above the five and i said what does that mean . They tried to tell you not to stay above that and if youre above a five that means theyre going to wantto do mething about it, theyre gog to want to give you a med. So then i talked to more ople and people told me that they know its kd of a cat and mouse game. That these numbers, you put em in and say. [inaudible] so people who are experiencing all, pain meds make you really a zombie. They rlly mess with your head. They make you tired. People who have a lot of pain sometimes i dont want to just be dopedup on opioids. Soeveral of my friends told me that they learned that when they learned to use the scale to control what the nurse or the doctor would do. If they didnt want more pain meds they would say a number. One of the things i learned from the book was just homuch it was exerted in terms of their power and own authority. That if youre talking about a Public School teacher which your book also discusses, or some of the teachers in that systemlike their natural reaction was to trump up the number because it was four and were so used to. [inaudible] where we haveour iq score and were expected to trust these things. And. [inaudible] so its fascinating to see in that ample you gave up the pain meds the patient, in other words the target for these is actually taking corol and its so rare. Even if these words e power over the targets of the source and thats a rare case where the targets take back the power. Would you want to talk about the teachers and the scoring system around the teachers . Lets talk about power first. I think just to go back to the pain system, the reason patients take control is because theyre the ones scoring that system. Andthats unusual. Somebody elses scoring you and we all grow up in school being scored all the time. So were used to being the subjects of somebody elses power and unfortunately kids learn very early on that the teacher is right or the grade is right and a grade will make them doubt themselves. Ive certainly doubted myself and i thought i would neverbe a political scientist. [inaudible] so numbers have an aura in our culture as being objective and a lot of slogans nowadays, we want to make databased decisions, we want our decisions to be driven by fax. At people mean nowadays by fax and data are numbers. They think that those a objective and words are squishy and obctive interpretationswhh they are. [inaudible] so people used scoring systems and all kinds of organizations to make decisions that are going to affect other peoples lives whether they hire them or fire them, talking about a new book that gives them insurance, whether to give them a bank loan and so the example that fascinates us about teachers is that people in education as they are perceived wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and could do something that had results so they came up with them a way to measure results which were testing students on reading and math. Pretty much those two subjects and then when students spent years in a teachers classroom and they did well on those tests, the results are distributed to the quality of teachers. So 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 the students test scores was due to teaching and how much was due to extraneous factors which is what the student had learned before and what the student in t previous grade was. [inaudible] what i say is the teacher wasgiven credit if you did better than expected. But expected comes up in the results of themathematical model. So then in addition to scoring people, the scoring pieces, the systems also either rewarded or penalized them on the basis of this score. Either that they could get fired or schools could be shut down or taken over by Emergency Managers orwhatever. And School Budgets could be determined by how well these teachers were performing. So it could be lifeanddeath consequences, job losing consequences for the teachers who get a bad score. And its the combination of the scoring system and the attachment of rewards and penalties that leads to these consequences. The scores that i talk about in the book, all of us that education does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract and pass a reading comprehension test or know the right grammar rules. So we really appropriated. To my mind a good teacher is one who instills curiosity in their students and then excitement about learning and confidence that they can learn. Children want to learn, that they can and push them and so encourage their imagination and nurture their creativity. Sure, i want my kids to learn. And i want them to learn how to read and write. But i want them to do so much more than that and i want to educate him to do that and the problem is these formulas for how much value a teacher adds to a student knowledge are really so narrowly defined and they include always these narrow types of education thats a small part of it. I often say that this is the idea of assessing a teacher with test scores is easily insufficient content. We have to either go through this 12 year torture of teachers but i guess we did see that. I want to move into a few things about how those get counted and i have a few examples here but i want to give you one. The essential, violence against women. Were talking about violence against women and im partly thankful for the example but the gdp, what is counted as production or for other nations and of course the captivation is. [inaudible] so take one of those that youd like to go through about to sort of lay down that folly that its counting is the easy part, its about what counts, gets categorized appropriately so that we cacount it later. I think we can come back in another context but the un wanted to develop a way to measure Different Countries, it had a whole bunch of readings and inviting people from Different Countries and what they wanted to do is set up some indicators. So say what counts as violence, is it rate or is it murder, is it beating up somebody . Is it taking somebody . So they got some people, women who were from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions that they would count as violence and ultimately they go around and do surveys and people had experience withthis or that. So there was rate and beating and kicking and so on, the things that western people came up with. Then there was some bangladeshi women and they said we have different kinds of violence in our country. Learning, setting you on fire, dropping you from a hard place, putting needles under your fingernails, gnashing your hands read they also said it was psychological violence to take another wife. Or to berate and punish a woman for not giving birth to a male child. Those were things they considered gender violence. And the committee that ultimately designed the survey with all the indicators didnt include any of those things. At the bangladeshi women had brought up. So there you have a case where its a question of whos in the room. We come back topower, really. Was in the room when these decisions are getting made, what counts and bangladeshi women were in the room but they werent Strong Enough to get their definitions of violence and experiences of violence counted as a simple desire so until thats. [inaudible] it is really about power but we dont have time for all of these questions i have so lets move ahead. Id like you to because i want to highlight positive stories, i want to let you talk about numbers and weaknesses in this context. I just want to say that a lot of people when they first hear that message they worry that im telling people never trust a number, numbers are no good, we should not count and that is not my message at all. I think numbers can be extremely helpful and i have lots of examples of it in the book. So the michigan water crisis is one of them. Where the city of flint switched its source of water from a detroit reservoir to the flint river i think it was called. And shortly thereafter, people started noticing that their water smelled and tasted funny and they started having pretty serious hair falling out, skin rashes. Aneverybody kns i think it turned out there was a lot of lead inthe water and a lot of heavy lead poising because of this water. But the numbers were really critical to finding out what the cause was. It turned out that the epa had run out protecons, had standards for what are safe levels of lead in water and there shouldnt be lead in water and the clean water act said no one should be using lead pipes anymore, that w 1986 but old pipes were grandfathered in. And flint michigan had a lot of other in their heights and the cdc uses numbers