I want to talk a bit about management measurement. I recently spent a number of years in a good sized multinational, and I watched management trying to gain control through measurement. And mostly I watched as they gained the wrong sort of control; as they crystallized behaviour in ways that lose more from employees than they gained.
(This is an old, old piece, one of the few I saved from BOPnews. Originally written in 2004 back when I was still corporate. Since almost no one will have read it, and those who do won’t remember it, here it is again. I’m putting it back up because it relates fairly closely to the recent article on the lack of belief in good and why incentives rarely work.)
When you’re dealing with small numbers of people, simple measurements are all you need, and indeed the time spent measuring can be a simple waste of time. For larger groups, and as management becomes disassociated from the actual work of the organization, measuring is necessary so that management knows what is happening and can modify it. The old saying (which I’m sick of) is that “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” It’s a statement with a lot of truth to it, but so is this – “you measure what you manage, so you’d better be sure you’re measuring what you want to manage.”
Here’s an example. A friend of mine used to do customer support for laptops. He was measured on how long he was on the phone and how quickly he picked up. If he spent too long on the phone on average, then he was taken aside and reprimanded. These measurements encouraged tech support employees to get people off the phone as quickly as possible, whether their problem was solved or not. Assuming management actually wanted happy customers (ie, that they saw tech support as a way to sell the next laptop, rather than something they had to do as cheaply as possible) then the way to measure this would be to have an automatic survey at the end of the phone call, asking how satisfied the client is. Since there will always be jerks who are never happy with phone support, you set the threshold at a certain percentage of “unhappy” customers and then if someone goes over that you investigate. To keep productivity up you measure phone time and compare to satisfaction ratios and (horrors) investigate individual reps who spend more time than normal on the phone, then coach them individually on how to solve problems with less chit-chat while still keeping the customer happy.
I’m going to discuss five issues related to measurement. The first is the problem of measuring what you can easily measure. Simply put, it may be more difficult to measure some things than others. Management tends to measure those things that are easy to measure. In a call center there are plenty of systems which will allow you to track a wild variety of phone stats, but you can’t measure one CSR helping another with a call. In sales you can measure how many sales a salesman makes and how much they’re worth, but it’s more difficult to measure whether he’s made verbal promises your company will have trouble living up to. You can measure the number of code lines a programmer put out, but it’s harder to measure how easy they will be to maintain down the line.
This is often a systems issue. Whatever the system assists your employees to do, is easy to measure. So if you have a system that presents work items, and which employees close those work items, it’s easy to measure how fast they’re doing them. But what if some work items are harder than others? And what happens to those employees who are taking calls or e-mails you can’t track and are helping customers or other employees with those problems – is that behaviour you don’t want to encourage? Because if you’re measuring only processing times then those who do other things will be measured as less productive. So they stop helping customers, and soon you have a reputation as having unresponsive employees who never want to take time to help people.
And this leads to the second issue, which is what I call Putting your Fingers Down. Another way of putting it, is “you get the behaviour you measure.” If a job involves 10 activities, and you publicly measure only 5 of them, your employees will gravitate towards those activities. It often seems obvious what an employee does. Let’s say you have repair techs in a retail store and you decide to measure their productivity by measuring how many appliances they repair. Sounds good eh? Productivity increases and you’re happy.
Until you start getting complaints that the repair techs don’t want to talk to customers, and that when they do all they seem to want to do is get away from them. You also hear that some techs are taking easy repairs and leaving the hard repairs for others, who put them off, because that boosts their stats. So easy repairs are getting done fast, the hard ones are getting done slower, and customers aren’t getting individual personal attention any more, so they aren’t happy. That worked well!
Which leads to what I call the The Limits of Coercion. Public measurement is a form of coercion. The idea is to measure people and then push them to do better and get rid of the ones who don’t measure up. You put your fingers down and say, “do this!” And you can absolutely do it. Whatever behaviour you are able and willing to take the time to measure, you can and will get. But what you can’t get is positive cooperation. You can’t make people do the extra things. And people resent the wrong type of measurement. The problem is that you as management think you understand the job. Problem is, unless you still do it yourself, you probably don’t. Outside of the sort of jobs that are truly subject to Taylorization, most jobs require a myriad of little tasks and if people don’t do them, the overall job suffers. If you start measuring the wrong specific things then people’s attitude when you pull them in for a talk is “I’m doing fine on the stats you said you want, I don’t have time for the other stuff.”
The other problem is that people subvert the measurements. There are almost always ways to make the numbers come out better than they should, and people will take the time to find them and do them. Which leads to the fourth issue, the question of “Public metrics and private metrics.” Simply put, when you’re setting up metrics you should first find out which metrics track each other; figure out why they track each other; and measure both sets. But one set you keep private and the other is the public set. If the private set starts diverging from the public set then you should investigate if people are fiddling with the public set. Odds are they are.
But the real, final point is that you should be looking for your “Bottom Line Metrics”. In a call center it might be the percentage of happy callers divided by the average time per call. In a processing center I once worked in the VP (a very wise man) used to publicly (I’m sure privately he had a number of measurements which had to remain satisficed) measure only one thing – the average time from a piece of work entering the center to the time it left. He didn’t measure any specific processing times – only how well the center was working overall. If that number went up he’d want to know why, and when he wanted it to go down he let people tell him how they were going to get it down, not the other way around. The center ran very well. When he left his successor started putting his fingers down and both customer satisfaction and employee happiness declined.
In the end you should ask yourself “what are we trying to accomplish?” Then you publicly measure that, and only that. It may seem that you want to do multiple things, but in most cases you can boil it down to one thing – as with the customer service center where happiness was divided by call times. You want people to go away happy after their call with the least time necessary to make them happy. If you can’t break it down then you either don’t understand what the job actually entails (or what your division or company does) or you may need to break the work into different functional groups.
Finally, don’t fall into the MBA trap. As a manager you probably don’t really know what your employees are doing. You probably don’t really understand what is required to do the job well. However unless you’ve beaten them down too hard, or you’ve got a crew of reprobates, most people want to do a good job. Most people want to be able to say “damn, we’re good!” Don’t treat them like untrustworthy children, and you may find that they’re on your side and that measuring only the bottom line, on the minimum, is sufficient. When you go to war with your employees and try and measure every specific behaviour, generally both sides lose.
(Originally published in 2004 at BopNews. Republished April 17, 2009.)
(My writing helps pay my rent and buys me food. So please consider subscribing or donating if you like my writing.)
Tallifer
This is quite thought provoking analysis. It rings true when it describes the effects of attempts at control, and it does not prescribe outlandsih remedies. I am not sure I can subscribe to the notion that most people want to do a good job. In my more pessimistic moods, it appears that most people want to say, “Damn, I am so good, that I should not put in any effort.” After all, my youthful motto was “Minimum face, eumque bene.” (Do the minimum and do it well.)
larue
Ian, I so want to side with ya.
But.
The worker bee’s v. the management . . .
A great divide.
I’ve been both.
It’s hard to measure . . . most management sucks.
And many workers suck, too.,
I’ve been a co-worker. Often, they sucked.
I’ve been a manager, most workers sucked.
On this topic, it’s hard to deliberate, as it’s honestly case by case driven.
You can’t generalize.
But thanks for a heck of a read.
The problem is what management represents anymore, and what ownership demands.
Workers are fucked.
And you know it.
😉
Barry
Ian, you’ve hit it head on (and I say that with a degree in organizational behavior).
In school, classmates would ask what was going to be on the final. They were adapting to the metrics that were going to be applied to them, as opposed to learning as much as possible. (This tells us something important about the US obsession with standardized testing)
At the supermarket, one of the metrics was items/minute checked out. So when a mother came through the line with 50 jars of baby food, instead of entering the price X 50, we’d ring one jar through and then hit repeat 49 times. Someone had spread the word that this made a higher count/minute…I’d bet that was an incorrect bit of lore.
As a manager, I found the Hawthorne Effect was real. Employees don’t like being micro-managed and treated with distrust; they also don’t like being ignored. Ignoring them teaches them that what they do doesn’t matter. If you educate them as to what the organization’s objectives are and how their work matters in the overall scheme, they can engage their minds figuring out ways to adapt their work to the objectives instead of just the metrics. I think this also makes a lot of work more interesting.
Another thing I discovered when I was a manager was that many of my peers would talk about how lazy their staffs were and how they needed to be watched like hawks. In the same conversations, they would talk about how our boss was an oppressive micro-manager. EVERYONE in a hierarchy happens to be at that exact level where they work best when given a free rein to exercise their creativity on behalf of the company; and where everyone below them needs to be regimented, measured, and punished to prevent shirking. Funny how that works out.
Ian, have you read any Mintzberg? Or did I already ask you that at FDL?
john hynes
I’m hoping and praying that that this poorly written piece and its comments will gather dust. I suspect none of you could manage a woman in full heat much less a company.
jo6pac
John are you angry?
I owned small business with employees and now work for large regional company in Facilities. I don’t talk to management for days or until they want something out of the normal day. They don’t trust any of us and only a few people in the company even know what we do. Ian almost everything you wrote is true and we are soon to be measured in how much we can do and I hope to make another year before they fire me because I’ll be to slow. My goal with a large project that might take several months or a few hours is to not come back when I’m done. I was trained as a Millwright and in that trade you only got one chance to do it right and if you didn’t a lot of money/time went out the door.
On another note my group was just transferred to the under 30 who are reinventing the wheel. I didn’t make any friends when I reminded them that it always ends up round, only maybe with a white wall or red lettering.
Thanks Ian
Mandos
Wow hit the double jackpot of sexism and libertarian nuttery.
Ian Welsh
My first troll. Yay!
Barry – if I have read Mintzberg, I don’t recall it.
Tallifer and Larue: I’ve managed teams but not above that level, and I have found that if I treat most people the right way, I get good performance. Now this isn’t universal, some people don’t respond. But I’ve gotten good performance from folks other people couldn’t, and that’s mostly because I both have high expectations and high regard for people. I think they can do a good job, I find things to like about them, and they want to keep/get my good regard because most people don’t get nearly enough good regard.
In the same way I am a pretty tough teacher (though obviously I have far less experience teaching than Tallifer). But, again with some exceptions, I find that I can get most people to learn because I think they can do it, and I admire them when they do.
I don’t want to oversimplify, but in my experience in workplaces, you more often get what you expect from people than not. If you expect them to be lousy, they will be.
Barry
I just lifted this from a comment by Paul Rosenberg on OpenLeft. He’s quoting the transcript of a recent Bill Moyers program:
BILL MOYERS: Yes, one of my favorite scenes, in Season Four, we get to see the struggling public school system in Baltimore, through the eyes of a former cop who’s become a schoolteacher. In this telling scene, he realizes that state testing in the schools is little more than a trick he learned on the police force. It’s called “juking the stats.” Take a look.
ASSISTANT PRINCIPAL: So for the time being, all teachers will devote class time to teaching language arts sample questions. Now if you turn to page eleven, please, I have some things I want to go over with you.
ROLAND “PREZ” PRYZBYLEWSKI: I don’t get it, all this so we score higher on the state tests? If we’re teaching the kids the test questions, what is it assessing in them?
TEACHER: Nothing, it assesses us. The test scores go up, they can say the schools are improving. The scores stay down, they can’t.
PREZ: Juking the stats.
TEACHER: Excuse me?
PREZ: Making robberies into larcenies, making rapes disappear. You juke the stats, and major become colonels. I’ve been here before.
TEACHER: Wherever you go, there you are.
DAVID SIMON: You show me anything that depicts institutional progress in America, school test scores, crime stats, arrest reports, arrest stats, anything that a politician can run on, anything that somebody can get a promotion on. And as soon as you invent that statistical category, 50 people in that institution will be at work trying to figure out a way to make it look as if progress is actually occurring when actually no progress is. And this comes down to Wall Street. I mean, our entire economic structure fell behind the idea that these mortgage-based securities were actually valuable. And they had absolutely no value. They were toxic. And yet, they were being traded and being hurled about, because somebody could make some short-term profit. In the same way that a police commissioner or a deputy commissioner can get promoted, and a major can become a colonel, and an assistant school superintendent can become a school superintendent, if they make it look like the kids are learning, and that they’re solving crime. And that was a front row seat for me as a reporter. Getting to figure out how the crime stats actually didn’t represent anything, once they got done with them.
BILL MOYERS: And you say that’s driving the war on drugs, though, right? The stats, not the-
DAVID SIMON: Dope on the table. Stats, you know, “We’ve made so many arrests.” I mean, they used to ride around Baltimore under one administration, and say, “If we can make 54 arrests a day, we’ll break the– we’ll have an all-time record for drug arrests.”
DAVID SIMON: Some of the arrests, well, it was people sitting on their stoops and, you know, loitering in a drug free zone, meaning you were sitting on your own steps on a summer day. Anything that is a stat can be cheated, right down to journalism. And I was sort of party to that.
So, I would be– I would be watching what the police department was doing, what the school system was, you know, you would look outward. But if you looked inward you’d see that the same game is played everywhere. That nobody’s actually in the business of doing what the institution’s supposed to do.
someofparts
Now we get to watch the folks in charge mismanage a pandemic by measuring the wrong things the wrong way.
Astrid
Someofparts,
I think it’s far worse than that. The folks in control are intentionally measuring the wrong things, often in the wrong way to boot, to boost their metrics and promote their narrative. Even then they still report bad numbers.
It’s akin a video games addicted kid being allowed to design their final exam and they design a video games exam, cheat outrageously on it anyways, and still gets a C.
Astrid
(brain still not functioning since someofparts made exactly those points. D’oh!)
someofparts
Not to worry. Just glad to see you around in comments. Thanks for the interesting things you were saying about China in the last thread. I got a good feeling about things I was hearing and hoped it was true.
In case it is of interest, I think Michael Hudson teaches and advises over there. From things he has written, I got the impression they are paying attention to the predatory tricks of American financial rulers and protecting themselves from us. I would hope that being next door to Russia would have given them a chance to see what we did to those poor souls and hopefully put them on alert to the lies and tricks of our banksters.
Ché Pasa
Adding China into this measurement mix makes for an interesting contrast and comparison with what our own ruling class and its handmaidens are up to.
By every rational measurement, China is doing very well under difficult and even impossible circumstances. The point is often made in the West that they lie about their statistics — and they probably do in some cases, just like so many Western nations do — but it doesn’t take much more than an overview to see that the lives of most Chinese people have improved dramatically in the last few decades, and that the government of China at every level is determined not only to preserve the gains that have been made but to expand them while not permitting an oligarchic overclass to scarf up most of the finances and resources of the country.
Yes, they saw what happened in Russia. Not about to let that happen to China. And they can see very clearly where the Oligarchs are taking the USofA.
I can see where Mao’s basic principles are being observed and followed, and the current efforts to curb the power and influence of private wealth are part of that, but what Xi and the Central Committee have done and have planned is well beyond Maoism.
And they measure all the time, at every level bottom to top. Measuring progress mostly. Oh yes, for power too. A government without power is useless, isn’t it? They don’t intend to be useless.
Ian talked about misuse of measurement and power, and from my perspective it’s gotten much worse since he wrote that piece. Much worse because of pervasive incompetence at the elite levels. The corner offices and executive suites are filled with people who haven’t got a clue about anything beyond their own pecuniary interests. The public interest does not exist for them. “Society” does not exist for them. The suits and techno-t-shirts are adept at the accumulation of money and power but that’s it. They can’t see beyond it.
The sorry thing is that the wrong people are allowed to hold sway, and once they have sway there is no earthly way to get rid of their insanity, abuse, and destructive power.
“Democracy” cannot — and does not — control them. It’s the other way around.
(As a side note, Gavin Newsom is one of the emptiest and most dispiriting governors in office. Attempting to recall him was stupid, but stupider was electing him in the first place. “Democracy” cannot save California or the rest of us.)
Hugh
Measurement in business often seems about creating an excuse for doing something. So if you want to intimidate workers, cut some positions. Call it efficiency. If one department does better work, but another is located in another country and the wages are cheaper, forget efficiency and call it economics.
Cultural icons like Bezos and Musk are monsters who have nothing but contempt for their workers, and customers. They use stats to justify their abuse. Most businesses only need to efficient enough, profitable enough to be successful. They could treat both their workers and customers better. They just don’t.
NR
China has the most billionaires of any country in the world except the United States.
Mark Pontin
NR: ‘China has the most billionaires of any country in the world except the United States.’
And Xi’s new cultural campaign is meant precisely to bring them to heel and show them that the Party remains the boss.
Most particularly, Jack Ma and Alibaba have been used as an example to make clear to other oligarchs with thoughts of getting into the money/credit creation game that the People’s Bank of China and its ancillaries intend to retain the monopoly on that.
So we’ll see.
As for Ian’s post, I think the 2009 commenter who brought up the ‘juking the stats’-WIRE reference was right on on the measurements issue.
someofparts
“As for Ian’s post, I think the 2009 commenter who brought up the ‘juking the stats’-WIRE reference was right on on the measurements issue.”
Full agreement with that observation. I have thought before that the WIRE was like a master class in what is hopelessly broken in this country.
Hugh
Comment still in mod, Xi has more in common with Putin than Mao. Putin controls his oligarchs. Xi is moving to control his. A lot of independent corrupt, rich oligarchs would represent a competing locus of power, and that would be unacceptable and dangerous to either Putin or Xi. Anti-corruption drives are a popular trope in Chinese politics so this is the vehicle Xi is using and it happens to be somewhat good for the Chinese people.
Jim Harmon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x8XkNlZpWw – California’s Burning – Dave Alvin and the Guilty Women
People are aholes, I guess.
Jan Wiklund
The best book about the measuring mania I have read is Jerry Z. Muller: The tyranny of metrics, https://www.perlego.com/book/840027/the-tyranny-of-metrics-pdf?. It discovers why it exists (bosses usually don’t master the trade and need a light even if it is false), why it doesn’t work even for the organizations that use it, and when it occasionally may be valuable.
Plague Species
Such profundity in only a few short words. Except for you, Jimmy. You’re a Buddha of sorts and everyone loves you.
Astrid
Maoist principles (as well as other left leaning nationalism) is extremely pragmatic. Do what works. If it stops working, try something else. Sometimes that something is extremely harmful folly like the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward, though note how fast China actually recovered from these follies. The Chinese economy was back on course by the mid 60s. Mao was meeting with Nixon 5 years after Cultural Revolution and the post-Mao transition was peaceful and stable.
I do hear a lot about the Chinese government measuring a lot of things, at all levels. For things like their high speed rail development, they will try out a lot of different approaches before deciding on one that works best. Early on, there were definitely some spectacular crashes and corruption cases, but the important thing is that they learned their lesson and moved forward. They learned that prototyping and competitive selection is cheaper and less harmful than just being good at recovering from big mistakes.
(I remember when I really realized that the West was doomed. It was Ian’s article about how the elite is buffered from the consequences of their actions, this they have no incentive to ever make good decisions. We’re doomed not because we lack the resources or capabilities as a population, we are doomed because we are governed by Czar Nicky II with extra secret police and disinformation appendages.)
Deng made a choice to pursue growth at a massive environmental cost, huge social inequality, and massive corruption. He did it presumably because the Chinese leadership saw no other way to catch up. Even before USSR break up, they saw what happens to developing countries that don’t develop and comes under the sway of US intelligence apparatus. The CPC always said that they were ultimately pursuing socialism in the 40 years since, I just don’t think anyone really believed them until the last 5 years.
Plague Species
I remember, Chen Lu, when I really realized that humans were doomed. I think the Chinese are human, so if the West is doomed, so too is China and Russia and you name it.
Hugh
The Great Leap Forward lasted from 1958 to 1962, Somewhere between 30 and 45 million Chinese died in it, mostly from starvation. The Cultural Revolution lasted from 1966 to either the offing of Lin Biao in 1971, or more commonly to Mao’s death and the end of the Gang of Four in 1976. It managed to kill hundreds of thousands to a few million. It took until 1978 for Deng Xiaoping to really begin to reverse it. I would hardly call some 20 years of murderous insanity that killed tens of millions and traumatized hundreds of millions “extremely pragmatic.” But if you do, you can add the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre to your list of great moments in Chinese pragmatism.
Astrid
The Chinese have forgiven the CPC for their part actions. What ignorant westerners think shouldn’t and doesn’t matter. Focus on fixing our stupid evil system or figure out ways to escape it. If you want to fixate on murder of millions of innocent, the US track record is much more recent, less justified, and continuing. Why not fixate on that rather than repeating the “humanitarian intervention” lie that have destroyed the lives of hundreds of millions around the world.
I don’t expect any sort of honest response to this from the resident China haters/liberal imperialists though.
Astrid
The US and USians have no business telling any other country, including indubitably evil ones like the current Myanmar regime and North Korea regime, what to do. The US track record in the past 60 years is so shitty that any intervention should immediately be considered a negative.
Only USians who never seriously talked to non-USians wouldn’t know this. Though in Hugh’s case, I think he knows this very well but denying it is the only way for him to keep his self righteous hard-on.
Astrid
China’s approach probably won’t solve humanity’s existential problems, but it makes sense to look to approaches with better track records than double down on a system that’s failed all but the global top 0.00001%.
Plague Species
Who says “Usians?” Certainly not an American. Right, Chen Lu?
So criticism of China equals advocating for humanitarian intervention? No one here has advocated for intervening in the Animal Farm that is China and China proper.
I consider any intervention a negative, certainly, but that doesn’t preclude me being openly critical of China or any totalitarian regime, including and especially America.
You’re a censor, Chen Lu, and censorship is very CCP. You want to squash any criticism of China as though China is beyond reproach. It’s not beyond reproach and we can criticize China any time we please, thank you very much. Last time I checked, this venue is not China or Chinese.
Astrid
Last time I checked, the Americas include quite a few other countries that did not invade Iraq, support Israel, fund “moderate rebels”, etc. Just because I’m USian for the time being doesn’t mean I want to appropriate and slander all those other people by saying “American” when I mean people involved in the US political system.
I love how rather than engaging in arguments, the anti-Chinks contingent spends their time on dishing out ungrounded racist and misogynistic ad hominem. And uncritically repeating Russia Russia Russia hysteria and now repeating debunked ASPI lies. And you think you’re somehow better than QANON?
Alright, time to get off this crazy train. PS, think whatever the hell you like. Your life seems like it’s completely falling apart (do you have a life beyond posting here?) and I’m not interested in accelerating that trend. Good luck to your wife and kids, I hope you’re better to them IRL than what you say about them online.
Hugh
I see a lot more of this kind of argument nowadays: if you just deny, ignore, and minimize all the bad that China, Trump, who or whatever do, they come out looking a lot better. Add in several dollops of righteous indignation that anyone, anyone would question this, and the comedic effect gets even better.
bruce wilder
The narrative currently approved for CCP propaganda is one of perfect, “pragmatic” continuity of effort by the CCP since the founding of the Party in 1920 (?) and the founding of the PRC in 1949. The Party has been the persistent instrument of social and material progress in this telling of the tale.
This narrative contradicts Western capitalist propaganda, which has always emphasized the body count of totalitarian schemes gone wrong.
It is good for one’s sanity, I think, to recognize that both narratives are propaganda, designed to obscure the complexity of the past rather than illuminate history. And, it is good, too, to recognize how easily everyone and any one can be enveloped by a propaganda narrative.
While I appreciate Astrid for speaking up for a view of China as both a modern place and a culture informed by travel and personal acquaintance, I am not persuaded by the rosy view she takes of China’s intentions and behavior as a superpower and the leading economic power in the world. That China is dangerously expansionist and imperialist seems undeniable to me, indicated by its determination to dominate Tibet and the South China Sea as well as to build out a global trade and transport net that it closely controls. I do not think one needs an engorged organs of righteous indignation to see why Chinese nationalism combined with these ambitions pose serious risks.
Ché Pasa
Funny. China has dominated Tibet since at least the 18th Century. China has had an interest in and been a presence in the South China Sea since before that. And both Tibet and the South China Sea are immediately adjacent to or within the borders of modern China, just as Xinjiang is.
And yet somehow, somehow this is considered “dangerously expansionist and imperialist” by Bruce — and btw most of the punditocracy, and the foreign offices of the entire English Speaking World (with the possible exception of New Zealand) all of which are legatees or instigators of some of the most brutal, exploitative and expansionist Imperial projects in history. Methinks there might be a wee bit of projection involved.
I don’t fully understand China’s ruling system and ideology, and my reading of Mao may be off by some degrees. After all, I was brought up in the mire of Cold War propaganda in which lies were told willy-nilly about the Soviet Union and Red China, many of which are still operative in the foreign policy and general political establishments of the West. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the transformation of China matter not at all. Russia and China are still the Twin Enemies to be ritually denounced, surrounded and fought to the death.
I couldn’t live under the Chinese system — too much of an inherent rebel, I am — but it’s plain enough that the Chinese are better off and happier for the most part than under any previous ruling regime, and certainly better off and happier than they would be as tributary to or colonized by the West. Condemning China for its human rights violations is risible given the horrors perpetrated by the US/Nato throughout the Middle East, South Asia and Africa — all distant from the perpetrating countries — for the entire history of Western Imperialism and especially during the recent impulse to revive the Anglo-American Imperial Project with as much projection of force, bloodshed, starvation and destruction as widely spread as they can get away with.
China is no paradise and its ways are not everyone’s ways. But projecting on to China the worst of what the West and particularly the Anglo-Americans in the West have done in the whole wide world for generations and generations is, shall we say, propaganda and not helpful.
Hugh
The Chinese lost their case brought by the Philippines before the UN (the Permanent Court of Arbitration) for the South China Sea because China had no special claim to the area because rocks sticking up out of the sea are not used as a basis for a territorial claim of the adjacent waters and the area has been used for centuries by fishermen of the various countries in the area. You really should take a look at the size of the area China claims. It claims everything between China to within a few miles of the west coasts of the Philippines, goes south along the entire coast of Vietnam down to Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) and down further south still to Borneo (Malaysia). Not only does China claim all the waters right up to these countries, denying their own territorial and use claims, but many of these areas are hundreds of miles from China. It would be like the US claiming it owned the Pacific Ocean from the Bering Strait to Tierra del Fuego in Chile, to Japan and Australia, and if any islands and countries intervened marking them off in shore-hugging boxes. Take a look at a map to see just how insane the Chinese claim is.
And the South China Sea claim is not a one off. It is part of a pattern from Chinese suppression of minorities in Tibet and Xinjiang, the suppression of autonomy in Hong Kong, its territorial dispute with India, and its aggressive moves toward Taiwan. The recent AUKUS deal didn’t appear out of nowhere either. China has been trying to sledgehammer Australia economically into being more obedient to Beijing.
If you want to criticize US policy, feel free. But there should be no double standards or Get out of Jail Free cards for other countries acting badly and like tin pot dictators.
Ché Pasa
Re: Double Standards.
That’s the problem, Hugh. The behavior of the Anglo-American imperialist, over hundreds of years, and certainly over the last 70, is far worse than anything attempted by China in interaction with the rest of the world. Not to mention the behavior of the rest of the Western imperialists all of whom committed unspeakable atrocities in China and much of the rest of the world again and again, some of whom are still doing it. Without a scintilla of remorse or self-reflection.
By all means, criticize China for its many failings, but understand that the Anglo-Americans and most of the rest of the West have done far worse for far longer in their quest for Empire, a quest that has not stopped. China’s interest is in its domestic territory and its immediate periphery. The Anglo-Americans and their (largely) European runnning dogs (to use a Maoist term ;)) are determined to control the whole world, China included, and at times it appears they will stop at nothing to have their way.
And, too, China is on the rise. The Anglo-American Imperial Project is not. Which is likely where the fear of China (and Russia, but that’s another issue) is centered in the foreign policy establishment. It’s time to get past it.
Trinity
Ditto on the 2009 The Wire comment. What an informative show that was. Heartbreaking, too, from the season that focused on the boys.
The topic of what to measure, and how, is of great interest to me from my dabbling in data science. I tend to focus on data visualization to avoid the messier side, but I chime in whenever I can to bring up some of the points Ian made, and I will be adding new ones I learned from him as well.
Nothing will change, however. My office focuses on the number of “widgets” produced almost entirely, and me and my team’s efforts to shift the focus to measuring the quality of those “widgets” is met with yawns. We are now encouraged to only speak of “happy” things, and to work only on things that will “work” or be a “success”, producing bragging rights for the bosses. Everything is always delivered on time, nothing is ever late (even when it is), and even some times it’s even “early”. My boss, who retired a year ago, and died of Covid six months ago, is now being posthumously labeled a “maverick” and his work is now discounted. Naturally, the proponents of data science would never think to simplify what they do as Ian illustrates, and it all must involve machine learning or AI, because justification for their existence is why.
So my question is then: given this scenario of only counting widgets without regard for quality, which of the three governments under discussion here act in a way most similar to this approach to “solving problems”?
Maybe this is a rhetorical question, I dunno.
But I agree with Che’s suggestion that an awful lot of projection goes on in these arguments about which government is currently good or evil. That’s much easier. Evil would mean they have populations that are suffering at a basic survival level.
Money is also involved in these arguments, although that is rarely stated. If there are no bad guys anymore, why does any nation need 800 (?) military bases? Justification for their existence, and the enrichment and bragging rights for the managers is why. SSDD
Astrid
Bruce,
I cannot prognosticate on what China will do in the future, but its past record points to something that’s a better deal for the common man (even with all its barbarities such as footbinding and Confucianism and”pacifying” borderlands) than the West’s blood soaked 500 years “rise”. I can’t be that optimistic about China’s future either, physics and human history tells me that, but the CPC had beaten some impressive odds so far and the West’s lies about Uighurs (WUC is to the average Uighur as Bundy’s are reflective of the average Caucasian north American), Hong Kong, and the trivial border disputes (where each side has plenty of merits and faults, but non-Anglo know enough to not start a hot war) certainly makes any western narrative about China(and the rest of the world) automatically suspect.
I think you and I are in agreement that the US has done enough damage to the rest of the world (excluding UK, Australia, Canada, Gulf Arabs, Israel, and certain murderous right wingers in Latin America) and they just want to be left alone. Maybe they will do well, maybe they’ll do badly, but honestly it’s hard to imagine them doing worse than what the US has been doing to them for 70 years.