Hi deborah. Hi kathy its nice to meet you. I enjoyed your book. Thank you. Lets start this interview talking about you but also like the audience to hear the story which honestly frankly is in your introduction. You got a note from a professor he would never be a political scientist. Can you say more about that . [laughter] when i was in college i struggled with what i wanted to major in and i was torn between science and humanities or social sciences. I finally decided on social science with First Political science course we will read all of the philosophers and they all ask the question what is justice and how can you organize government and society to make life better for people particular lead to make justice . I decided to may become a Political Science major i he had a lack of confidence in my skills as a social scientist because i didnt get very good grades in those courses i got good grades in my science and math courses so it was a dilemma so i took this Political Science course you never remember the paper just the greater the nasty comments to say this is an incredible effort but you will never be a political scientist. That really resonates because one of the reasons it was the things that i realized talk about manifest destiny. To say that we should believe the what about the native americans this is not at all a reasonable theory or like geometry what i was taking out the loan taking at the time that i could be comfortable with that so i felt the discomfort was overwhelming but my interest was there for you think it was the opposi. Would you agree . Thats right. Also had a moment which led to this book. When he took my first economics course remember the lesser put up supply and demand and said about the market was because people buy things depending on the price and at the point the market is perfect when it raise my hand and said prices and the only thing people think about if they decide to buy something in the professor said i know thats true make this a simplification we can get some powerful conclusions by stripping away the extraneous stuff. Thank you for that story and i agree with you thats why with economics in college that this is a mathematical enough there were too many assumptions because if there were pure mathematics thats fine because that could be strippeddown and logical. But it does bring me to my first question i have been thinking through a lot with the idea that when we count things we have to classify them and strip them of the context and that is deeply human so tell us about that concept and classification as a metaphor. Met is the key point of my book. That whoever teaches us to count that there is a right answer but in fact you have to decide what belongs but in fact you have to decide what belongs puts down a bunch of apples and says count the apples, the kid has to know how to tell an apple from an orange and they have to be taught the rules before they can start to count. That is a simple one how to tell one teach the kids an apple from an orange. Somebody have to decide of all the right places in somebody is deciding who even gets to cast a ballot whos in and whos out that was before anybody starts to tally up the number of votes on the ballot. It is a very profoundoint if to comes after one and three cos after two et cetera but it has made me rethink that. But were just asking them to categorize in the first place one of my favorite that i came up with as a teenager was when you buy the piece of broccoli is at the stock or the florettes . I know that is a ridiculous example but is the same thing so what is the individl item of nature in this context with the way was ask our friends daughter to do to look in this category and its very important. So while ive been thinking about this a lot my friend is an accountant and people think that the tax calculation is hard but actually its very easy. So get rid of this once you have the income number that is easy thats the negotiation we are constantly doing but its an important point do want to provide more examples . Yes i do. I came to this insight because i was thinking about these numbers for a long time but i want to go back and see how kids learn to count and that moment and with the counting book this is one fish two fish red fish blue fish black fish and goes on and on with different kinds of fish and never gets past two high official fish slow fish vast fish not one of them is like another go ask your mother. And then i thought if one is not like another then how do you know they all are fish are you count them as fish . That made me realize everything is unique but language is the same when we teach kids words, we teach them for example by pointing those, the dogs nose, daddys nose, and now look anything alike but there are certain similarities to us adults some of them all under one word. I really think number is another kind of language to categorize. Thats the segway tour next question numbers are just a language but we also have this unbelievable power in you talk about that with the scoring systems and talk about the system whereby people can measure their own pain in a medical situation what does that even mean to measure womens pain on a scale between one and ten . Here had anything that causes pain alaska on a scale between one and ten how bad is it . Sometimes he will say one is hardly noticeable and ten is off the charts i cant stand it anymore to jump out the window. Most people are baffled by the question because we dont think about pain we experience in a lot of different ways but not like a thermometer with numbers. What i found interesting with the pain scale everybody finds it very difficult to put their pain with a number but yet the medical system keeps using it. I think it has some benefit nobody else can feel your pain and is just one of those experiences that is yours and yours alone and its really impossible to communicate. So trying to do that with the number is a start. There is a canadian doctor who came up with i think is a much better way asking people to have a handle on their pain it is a system of words just listen to people talk about their pain and he came up with 100 different words to characterize pain and most of the medical professionals said they think the word system is much more helpful to allow patients to express what they feel and to help clinicians understand what they feel. And they think some words apparently the person says them in the clinician says that is a stomach ulcer i making of that example but so even though i think the pain scale is very problematic and frustrating the big advantage is it is the language allows people to communicate a little bit of you say my pain was a ten yesterday but only a seven now that you are communicating you feel all that much better. And the doctors giving you pain med and then you say you still cant do they know to try Something Else it is a language of communicatn its better than nothing but its not very good. A couplof fascinating details about the pain numbers that in spades of the more contextual nuance for pain it works but like inrance Companies Prefer the numbers i think because they just want to know howuch they can char that if it was a bit of a six and you should be treated for it. So that is interesting. Sometimes it is more quantified or more objective from the perspective of the Insurance Agency but the flipside of that is the extent to which the patients themselves were the rule to assert control over their own treatment from what toay on their pain level can you talk about that slip . I learned from a friend who has cancer in using pain meds she said they dont want you to be above a five. What does that mean cracks . If you are above a five the means they want to do something about it and give you mess. So i talked to my people and they told me it is a cat and mouse game you five and the office staff puts down their own. s of people who are experiencing a lot of pain because they make you a zombie and mess with your head and you cant think clearly and they make you tired. The people sometimes think i dont want to be doped up on opioids. So several of my friends told me they learned they use the scale to control with the nurses or the doctor would do if they dont want more pain meds it was a alone number. In my book to learn how much a scoring system is in terms of power and authority if youre talking about a Public School teacher with that valueadded score in our system the natural reaction we are so used to trusting her score we have our weight and iq and we are expected to trust these things and the trust isnt always so its fascinating to see in that example with the pain meds the patient or the target of the scores taking control because it is so rare. Normally those scores is the power over the targetnd in the rare case where they take ba the power so do want to talk about the teachers and the scoring system . Lets talk about our first. Just to go back to the patient the reason why they take control because they score themselves. And that is unusual every other time somebody elses scoring you. We are use to being the one in the scoring system and unfortunately kids learn very early on the teacher is right i doubted myself when i got a being told i would never be a politica scientist but yet numbers have an aura in the culture to be objective and theres a lot of slogans nowadays to say we want to make evidencebased decisions and database decisions and to be driven by research and fact now what they mean they think those are objective and subject to interpretation which they are people use scoring systems to make decisions that will affect other peoples lives higher than fire them promote them give them a pay raise give them insurance or how much to charge them for insurance whether to give them a bank loan so the example people in education bureaucracy wanted to make sure that teachers were qualified and producing results. So they came up a way to measure results which was testing students on reading and math. Those two subjects and then when they do well, the result is distributed to the quality of the teacher if they do well so that is a simple model of how it works but they develop fancy formulas to try to sort out exactly how much the students test score was due to the extraneous factors like wet the kid learned before. And how they did in the past. The teacher would give them the credit if they did better than expted but that itself is a mathematical model. In addition to scoring people were teachers the system also rewded or penalize them on tha basis so they could get fired schools would be shut down or taken over by Emergency Management are put in recvership. And School Budgets would be determined how well the teachers are pforming. It could be lifeanddeath consequences like job losing consequences for a teacher to get a bad score so it is the combination of the scoring system and the attachment that ads to these consequences the scor what i tellhem all of us hope educati does so much more than teach people how to add and subtract and pass the reading comprehension test or grammar rules. So for my money a really good teacher is one who instills curiosity in the student and excitement about learning and confidence that they can learn. If they want to learn. And encourage their imagination and their creativity they dont have kids but i want my kids to learn how to count and read and write but i want them to do so much more than that but the formulas how much value a teacher adds to a students knowledge is so narrowly defined as these narrow parts of education. Yes i often say this is the idea of assessing a teacher with test scores is seen as the insufficient concept. We have to go through this 12 year experiment. I want to move back what gets counted and what doesnt. I have examples here but i want you to choose one like violence against women i want people to realize the gdp counted as production for other nations. As a virginia the slaveholder and then to lay that down very stroly and then to be categorized appropriately to be counted later. I think we can come back to other contracts. But the un wanted to develop different countries. And have a bunch of Committee Meetings and people from different countries. And then they want to set up some indicators of what constitutes violence . Rape . Murder . Beatings . Kicking somebody . So the women from north america and europe had a list of activities or actions they word count as violence. , smashing your hand. Those are things we think. They also said it was psychological violence to take another wife or to be raped 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 the indicators didnt include any of those things, so they have a case where its a question of who is in the room. We come back to power. The women were in the room that they were not Strong Enough to get the definitions of violence and experience count so when the survey gs done that will not be done. I want to move ahead and because i always looking for positive stories about numbers and power. Before i talk about that i want to say a lot of people worry im telling people never trust the number. Mbers are no good. We shod fact count. Numbers can be extremely helpful and i have lots of examplesf it in the book. So, the flint michigan water cris is one of them where the city which the source of water from detro and the flint river i think it was called and shortly after that people thought their water smelled and tasted funny and they started having pretty serious problems. Their hair was falling out, skin rashes and it turned out there was a lot of lead in the water. The numbers were critical they have standards for it shouldnt be they said nobody should be using lead pipes anymore. The cdc uses numbers to say how much is the state level. We should be concerned about but we dont need to treat above 45 they invited a water engineer to come in and test the water and he figured out right away that there was probably lead in the water because of corrosion from old pipes and so he tested the water and sure enough there were high levels. By the way, the Michigan Department of Environmental Affairs tested the water but claimed that it was safe. What they discovered as they told residents or send their inspectors in and let the water run for 30 minutes so they flushed the articles out of the pipes, so of course they got low readings. The water engineer came in and said he did a test and got numbers that were very, very high and then a doctor was hearing concerns from the mothers of her patients and had access to the blood levels and blood lead testing and she compared the blood levels before the switch to after and they went up dramatically so those numbers put together was the story that was made very convincing. Lead pipes corrode i still feel like the story we do find out that the numbers were on your side and get you lost. I think there was good Media Coverage of this. I even heard somehow those numbers they were somehow brought to the surface. The power somehow was overcome. Do you know how . I think two things. Its pretty typical. There were a few citizens. I think one mother in particular knew not to trust the numbers and insisted on and brought water samples into Government Agencies but i forget if she contacted the water engineer but citizen advocacy was one thing individually they got a lot to test their water. The second ingredient for overcoming per as the citizens d an ally in these agencies and governments and the water engineer and the doctor so they became passionate about the problems and worked with the citizens of the patients, the homeowners and so on. So of course the numbers even when they are right they do not always emerg victorious. Can youell us a little bit about what you call the evicted effect because im skeptical. Im going to ask you some things if you dont mind. Its that little device you wear on your wrist and accounts your steps. They tried to ma themselves exercise more and the intesting thing about it is everyone i know that has a fitted says that they walk more becausit is counting them to walk a little bit longer than they otherwise would. As you said as a methor for that its a phenomenon that when you count something a you want to look good on the measure you will change your behavior to get a goodount, to get a good number. I hope you appreciate my point i dont disagree with the fact they will change their behavior to make it look good. I write about that myself. Thats a very important factor but with regards specifically, i found they at least completely ignore them so one thing thats interesting you are listening to the people that still talk about it which is a very narrow group of people if you dont mind me saying. Thats the overwhelming story they dont actually cause people to change their behavior but there are a few people for whom it is what they really want and for them the story is different. Its a fair enough point. Only peoe that are motivated in this get a fitbit and wear it and once they are no longer motivated. What im saying is theres still hope forhe shortterm. At theoment or during that time may be a couple of months when they are infatuated with their new fitbit and the diet and probably do lose weight at first but maybe they dont stay on it. Of course that is the ultimate example. But fitbit and for that matter, diet theres one thing about having people select to buy them thereve been experiments where because the super users look so good Health Programs will buy them for everyone and those people never even wanted one to begin with. Its very selfselected small slice where that affect actually happens but lets not dwell on that point. Can you talk about the polling in that affect . Some try to understand the racist attitude seemed thinking and they do that by aing People Survey questions andome of the questions when i started looking into this just appalled me that anyone cld even ask these questions. Onof them is on a scale from one to seven where one is ly and seven is hardworking. The se thing on intelligence and violence for example. Do you think immigrants are generally good for the country are bad for the country kind of a ridiculous question so what those questions do they have a lesson that stereotyping is legitimate. You can decide every member of a racial group is at some degree of laziness hardworking and that is a legitimate way to think and i think that it reinforces for people that race is a real thing. To categorize them into black or white and it reinforces that whole group waiting to hear their political opinions want to know how people stereotype so it is a self reinforcing effect that i liken. Its this idea that you want to look good for the poll takers. Its called the social desirability afft people want to appear smart and not prejudic what amazing is there are plenty of people that are quite willing to express prejudiceut in geral that is i think a huge problem with the survey research sometimes they are known as telephone interviews but people want to sound good to someone interviewing them and i think half the time people dont know what a questn means they give an answer so they dont sound dumb. I found that to be a fascinating story in this section of the book and also related to this if you dont mind mentioning that. Sure. It started asking is this person hianic in the 1980s. The term wasnt even much use in the united states. There were people fm whose origins were from spanishspeaking countries particularly mexo, cuba, puerto rico. They tended to do clusters together in certain areas of the unitedtates and they didnt think of themsves as hispanic. They thought of themselves as puerto rican or new mexican then in the late 60s and 70s after the act, the government wanted to get that classification t make sure it could and force equal treatment d equal voting for example, so it started it wanted to collect data so the Census Bureau wanted to have a hispanic question, but they really didnt know, the leaders really didnt know how they were going to get people to think of themselves as hispanic. So, they called a meeting of hispanic leaders and asked them to promote the census to the community and to encourage people to identify as hispanic. They understood there would be benefits to being had. This measuring instrument put the question out there and recruited people to encourage people to answer the question. So, it was an interactive kind of feedback effect where the category was there and people put themselves into it. In peoples self regard and selfimage has an identity but reminds me also going back to the discussion we had of people choosing the pain number that would give them the treatment they want. This is another example of somehow the target asserting control over their own agency by filling out their own form and sometimes they were the masters of their own destiny by naming their ethnicity and race which is a whole different discussion about the race they might choose. Thank you for making that an analogy. I didnt see it quite in the same way but it is very much true that people get the chance to identify themselves and say what their race is and ethnicities and keep that in more categories and what choices you can have and you can write in some other race. Whats fascinating coming back to it is that some other race was the Third Largest category in the 2010 census and which tells me that people dont like to accept the categories that they are offered and its a funny paradox that says you can identify the race you say you are or want to be or consider yourselves. But on the other hand, the census people give categories an provide those categories. He last topic i want to cor but we are running out of time is this contest of the Services Hotline algorithm which is a mouthful but basically it a child abuse hotline and theres a wonderful book that talks about it and you talk about her work and some others. I ha to say ive spent write a bit of time talking to people that started that algorithm and im not saying its perfect. Its not perfe. They are well laid out in your book. People of color are much more likely to be reported on. They are choosing the wrong prediction variable which means they are creating their own reality by saying this kid is more likely to be taken from home. Theres all sorts of problems. But let me make the following plea. First of all weve been talking about power for this hour and a lot of the times i get frustrated because people are assuming in an unreasonable way. That happens a lot. You have no right to appeal but i would argue that in the case of social workers trying to deal with child abuse like i would like them to have a little bit of cover if it works for them and i say that because they have so much responsibility to make the right call on these actual life and death matters. And i think we can agree on this i would love if they had a machine that can actually help them do their job and if it was wrong they could be like the machine was wrong but usually when someone says dont blame me, blame the machine im like thats a copout, take responsibility but in this case yeah you did your best and its hard to make calls. And it really is hard, but the other i will make for that algorithm and again it is problematic is because it is data this is the same thing that could be true for the managing algorithms once they are made algorithmic the good news is you could also make them work better. You could shift the rules if the old rules are not working very well so thats my other plea. The final thing i will say you talk in the last part of the book about ethics and the thing i keep pointing out theres a false positive of the algorithm process of how to decide whether to take a child from their home if they are at risk of abuse. You could be taking kids away from their home and leaving kids in their home when they should be taken. Those are two mistakes a system could make and they are different mistakes and they are not equal. Its worse to leave the kid to abuse than it is to take a kid from a family they cannot take them out and im not saying tha its not a good idea but this is worse. Let me jump in. Absolutely. Anything we can do to help people and help leaders mak better decisions is a good thing and the good thing about numbers trying to measure things and come up with a system is that exercise of trying to measure things forces us to think about what we value and care about an whats important. And i think the point i want to leave people with is weve got a system maybe its better words still got probls but its better than weighing it out. Anything that can take the pressure off, but we shouldnt stop ever. We should always try to improve the systems and those measurements. Talking out the values and who is beinwhose beinhurt and who is being held the we are using them wisely. If we think ofhem as this is the score, thats the end, im m right and you are wrong, then that isnt a recipe for progress. I couldnt agree more and im glad i had a chance to read this book. Thank you very much. All after words programs can be viewed on the website at booktv. Org. I want to welcome you to the commonwealth club. Todays guest is an extraordinary activist, reformer and author. He has a brandnew book called liberty from all masters and im delighted to host the show today. My name is Roger Mcnamee and i want to start by telli y